Cross Cultural Communication And The Acceptability Of Translation

Translation is by all means an indispensable means to facilitate mutual communication culturally and ideologically among people speaking different languages. However, there are many different modes of social intercourse resulting from diverse cultural backgrounds and religious believes. Unfortunately, the unacceptable translated text in C-E translation—Chinglish always finds its way in Chinese-English translation (C-E translation for short in the following discussion). Chinglish is a misshapen and hybrid language incompatible with conventional English norms and customs. The frequent occurrence of Chinglish deeply hinders smooth communication between Chinese and English. Nevertheless, to improve the quality of translation is urgently needed in order to accelerate our socialist modernization. That is why it is of crucial significance to conduct close study on the acceptability of translated text in C-E translation, unacceptable translated text and the possible reasons of such translation so as to explore effective ways for eliminating such unacceptable translated text.The past twenty years has witnessed scholars' ardent debates about the definitions of two concepts "China English" and "Chinglish", which greatly stirs the author's attention on the nature of translation. At first, the main views of scholars on the definitions of these two concepts and especially the analytical definition of "conventional English" are presented in this thesis through which the author carefully explains the utter differences between these two concepts. This endeavor paves the way for the author's exploration into the nature of translation. Actually, translation is also a cross-cultural communication activity, involving diverse languages and societies. What follows is the author's probe into the standard of ideal translation. At this time, the main concepts of some theories such as the reception aesthetics and the adaptation theory are briefly introduced to help discuss the topic. The key is that the quality of translation will definitely be judged by the target readers. A translation is almost of no value if it is not accepted by the target readers. As a result, target reader's initiative and creativity should be laid great emphasis on in order to achieve successful cross-cultural communication. This means the language employed in C-E translation should be chosen with great care so as to adapt the translation to conventional English linguistic norms and English culture.On the basis of the above discussion, the author classifies the unacceptable translated text into "linguistically unacceptable texts" and "pragmatically unacceptable texts". Such classification is followed by a great deal of systemic analysis of the unacceptable translation in C-E translation, together with the presentation of the main reasons for such translation. The author argues that the existence of unacceptable translated texts in C-E translation attributes to nothing but the different cognitive environments between the readers of the original text and target readers. Therefore, the author carefully analyzes the main reasons of unacceptable translation by referring to the main concepts of cognitive linguistics. The reasons may include different cultures between Chinese and English, the interference and negative transfer of Chinese, inappropriate textbooks and teaching methods. Lastly, the author seeks to find ways aiming at more acceptable translation in C-E translation so as to improve the quality of C-E translation and hence achieve smooth interflow among countries. These solutions include two aspects: 1) the improvement of translators' linguistic competence; 2) the acquisition of cultural knowledge about target language, including the cultivation of their cross-cultural awareness and cultural creativity in English teaching.