On The Cultural Translation In All Men Are Brothers

Pearl Buck is a contradictory figure. She was born in the United States, but grew in China; she had been nurtured in the western and the eastern cultures; she wrote a great number of English works, but had China as a constant theme; she was regarded as "a bridge between the east and the west", but criticized by people coming from the two cultures. The reason why she was criticized in the United States was because she was not considered to have achieved as much in literature as Thomas Huxley and some other Nobel Prize nominated writers. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee declared that they had been directed by the will of Mr. Nobel that the prize was to be awarded to those who had made the greatest contribution to the communication of the world. In the eyes of the western people, Pearl Buck was a pioneer in propagating the Chinese culture. They believed that it was from Pearl Buck's works that the west began to know what China was really like,—a poor, uncivilized nation, instead of "a golden land". Differently, Pearl Buck was not praised in China because the Chinese people thought that she had distorted the Chinese culture and brought an unreal China to America. Even in China, opinions about Pearl Buck vary greatly. In order to get a fair and balanced judgment about Pearl Buck, I am determined to do some field work on her and try to find the causes of various views on her.The thesis focuses on the cultural translation study of All Men Are Brothers, Pearl Buck's translation of the Chinese classic Shuihu Zhuan. From a close study, I noted that domesticating and foreignizing were adopted by Pearl Buck in the translation. But they were used according to different situations. Domesticating was employed when the religious cultures and the narrative part were translated while foreignizing was found mainly in the speech translation. Religion is a marked characteristic of a nation. It signifies a nation's cultural identity. Pearl Buck familiarized the target readers with the Chinese culture by reproducing Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism in the source text according to the religious belief of the western culture. By doing so, she drove the source text to the target readers, colonized the Chinese culture and deprived the existing right of the Chinese cultural identity. When the language of the author is domesticated, the effect is that the western readers tend to believe that they are reading a novel written by an English writer. On the other hand, foreignizing was dominant in the speech translation. Foreignizing is supposed to make a translation transparent for this strategy reduces the reproduction of the source culture to the minimum. But in the translation studies, the problem of functional equivalence can not be neglected. Generally, a reader who is not supplied with sufficient background information about the source language culture, especially when it belongs to another religious family, is not able to fully understand the source-language culture. There is no doubt that word-to-word translation can not evoke the same emotion on the target readers as on the original readers. The failure in functional equivalence is not able to build a successful cultural communication. The paradox is that what Pearl Buck did not manage to achieve is widely accepted as what China was like by the western world. I assume that Pearl Buck's purpose was to maintain a "Chinese" theme for drawing the western attention through exaggerating Chinese stereotypes. Selecting either foreignizing or domesticating, Pearl Buck has one purpose: demonstrating for the western world and controlling the right of discourse. More unfortunately, some ridiculous words or sentences in the translation text are thought by the western people to be the stereotyped Chinese people who then seem to be uncivilized and unreasonable.While scholars are heatedly taking about whether foreignizing or domesticating should be adopted in translation, a rising figure in Post-colonialism, Homi Bhabha, puts forwards his hybridity theory. With the help of this theory, we are able to explain why the opinions on Pearl Buck vary that much. Respecting cultures from the two nations involved in translation is not to be achieved through using foreignizing and domesticating at the same time for the intention of foreignizing and domesticating is not always the same. Translation process is a process to find "the third space" between the two cultures because identity is composed of difference and recognition. Homi Bhabha's hybridity theory solves the problem of foreignizing and domesticating and also throws light on our appraisal on Pearl Buck.