The Translation Of Classical Chinese Poetry From The Perspective Of Cultural Context

This paper aims at exploring how to present the cultural elements in translating classical Chinese poetry into English from the perspective of cultural context theory, under the guide of the functional equivalence principle, so as to discuss the problem of handling cultural factors in translating.There are two basic steps in the translation process: comprehension and representing, both of which are taking place in the context. Context, the environment of language use, is the foundation of language understanding and rendering: no context, no meaning. And based on the researches of the previous scholars, context can be further divided into three kinds, namely, linguistic context, situational context and cultural context, of which cultural context is the most important one form the viewpoint of functional linguistic. Because translation is a cultural activity by nature and one of the main purposes of translation is cultural communication. But culture varies from country to country, so it always sets a lot of obstacles for translators in actual translation. Poetry, the quintessence of a culture, rich in cultural specific messages which have different cultural connotation in different cultural contexts, can best represent the cultural context of the ST. This paper presents an explorative analysis of the cultural context, puts forward a theoretical framework and the translation strategies to approach the cultural equivalence in classical Chinese poetry translation, and demonstrates them with ample case studies.Research in this paper is conducted as follows in five Chapters. In the first Chapter, the background and the research purpose are stated. In the Chapter two, the previous research on context and cultural context is being discussed to formulate a theoretic framework. At the same time, a clear relationship between cultural context and translation has been proved and explained. In this Chapter, the functional equivalence principle has also been briefly introduced, since the discussing of the quality of translation must be under some standard. In the Chapter three, by illustrating some typical examples, the cultural elements of cultural context in classical Chinese poetry are carefully discussed and categorized. Chapter four, based on the effort in the previous part, puts forward practical translation strategies and basic methods of dealing with the cultural factors in classical Chinese poetry to realize the aim of this paper. Finally in Chapter five, the main findings, the limitation and the possible direction of further study are stated.