Cultural Misreading In Literary Translation-A Case Study Of Fortress Besieged

Traditional translation studies have been focused mainly on the perspective of the differences in language structure, of the comparison between source and target texts and considered the translation as a negative reappearance of the source text. Thus"faithful to the original"became the highest criterion in most translation studies in China and western countries. However, there were so many cases of unfaithful translation in literary translation. Because people have been focused on the discussions of"faithfulness","literal translation and"free translation", etc, there were no scientific explanation to such unfaithfulness phenomenon. Cultural misreading in this thesis belongs to this unfaithfulness phenomenon.With the"cultural turn"in the late 1970s, people began to look at translation from the perspective of cross-cultural. The"cultural turn"signifies that the emphasis should shift from translation texts to translation cultures, from linguistic factors such as phonology, vocabulary and syntax to cultural ones such as ideologies, religions, ways of life and thought patterns. This cultural approach can definitely shed lights on misreading because misreading which has stamps of culture is attributed to cultural factors. It reveals the difference, collision and distortion in cultures. Enlightened by this theoretical background and based on the Reception theory and Cultural Presupposition, this thesis probes into the cultural misreading in literary translation. This thesis gives its own definition of cultural misreading. Cultural misreading refers to misinterpretation of the original and the translator's subjective adjustments of cultural elements in the original.Every receptor comprehends other culture according to his own cultural modes and customs, namely, his own views limit his understanding and interpretation of the foreign culture in a certain sense. The reception theory sees these factors which take part in and exert influences on reception as an organic system and calls them"horizon of expectations". Iser thinks the literary work is a structure full of indeterminacies and needs the readers to fill in the blanks according to their own expectations. Text blank and the readers'horizon of expectations stress the indeterminacy of the text and the active function of the readers. This can account for cultural misreading in literary translation. Cultural Presupposition refers to the underlying beliefs and assumptions which shared by the people in one community and which are often cultural-rooted. It may substantially and systematically influence the translator's interpretation of the source text without his knowing it. Thus it results in cultural misreading.This thesis selects several examples from the English version of Qian Zhongshu's famous novel Weicheng and discusses the inevitability and the reasons of cultural misreading. Cultural misreading is mainly resulted from the subjectivity of the translator shows in the two reception activity. In the first reception activity, he, as the first reader of the original, accepts the text actively by using his horizon of expectations to interpret the text, he misreads the cultural-loaded words because his horizon of expectations is different from the source readers. In the second reception activity, he should take his intended readers'horizon of expectations into consideration. He sometimes changes the translation strategies so that it results in the cultural misreading of the target readers to the cultural-loaded words in original. Moreover, because of different cultural presupposition, the translator can't interpret the original cultural information as the author expects. So he misreads cultural information without his knowing it. At the same time, this thesis also analyses the consequences of cultural misreading. Although cultural misreading has its positive side, its negative side is more distinctive. It can distort the original and hinder the target readers from knowing the true features of the source culture. From the above analysis, the thesis thinks it is necessary to avoid the negative consequences of cultural misreading in the practice of literary translation.