On Translation Of Idioms From Chinese To English From The Perspective Of Cultural Equivalence

With the increasing popularity of cross-cultural communication, a shift from a linguistic approach to a cultural approach has been found in translation studies. Now translation has been broadly regarded as an act of intercultural communication. As the crystallization of human language and culture, idioms translation has drawn attention in the translation field, but the translation of Chinese idioms into English is far from satisfactory, from which, to a great extent, is culturally derived. As a matter of fact, the influences of culture on the idioms are so pervasive that scarcely any text can be adequately understood without a profound knowledge of its cultural background, let alone an exact translation of it.This paper, based on a thorough study of the translation of idioms taken from the English version of Ch'ien Chung-shu's Wei Cheng-Fortress Besieged, aims at discussing the translation of Chinese idioms into English from the angle of conveying cultural information. Therefore, making a deep comparative study of Chinese idioms from a cultural perspective is not only helpful to have a good grasp of the meaning and use of the language, but also will improve the translation quality, thereby facilitating intercultural communication.This thesis falls into four chapters:The part of introduction talks about the background of present study, the questions needed to be answered in this study and the purpose of the study, the methods employed in this study and the significance of it.Chapter one is the literature review of this thesis. This part starts by discussing the close relationship between culture and translation-they are closely related to each other. In fact, translation is essentially an intercultural communication through the medium of language. Then the author introduces equivalence theory, giving special attention to three great translators and translation theorists:Yan Fu, Nida and Newmark. Combining Yan Fu's translation principle of Xin,(ä¿¡)Da(è¾¾)and Ya(é›…),Nida's functional equivalence, and Newmark's communicative translation, this paper presents a theory of cultural equivalence, the theoretical foundation, and discusses its concepts and ranks.Chapter two gives a bird view of the book Wei Cheng and its translation versions. In this part, the author mainly reviews and analyzes the domestic and overseas studies and their findings about all the aspects involved in this study, including studies on Wei Cheng, its translators and the translation version of Wei Cheng.Chapter three first gives the definition and scope of idioms, and then from the five origins of idioms, comparatively analyzes the relationship between the idioms and the life experience, myths, legends and fables, historical events and famous figures, religions as well as the development of science and technology in each country. The following part is devoted to the translatability of idioms and classifies into cultural translatability, cultural semi-translatability and cultural untranslatability. Then the paper briefly discusses the relationship between cultural equivalence and idioms translation. At the end of chapter three, methods and techniques employed in this thesis will be mentioned.At the beginning of Chapter four, two methods of translation are introduced to achieve cultural equivalence, namely, domestication and foreignization. In order to examine how and to what extent cultural equivalence can be achieved during the course of translating, by analyzing the idioms in Fortress Besieged, a relatively systematical and comprehensive comparative analysis is made about translating some typical Chinese idioms into English. At last, it is concluded that in most cases, cultural equivalence can be obtained in translating, but sometimes cultural equivalence only can be achieved partially because of certain cultural barrier. In addition, translators should use domestication and foreignization flexibly so as to achieve as much cultural equivalence as possible.Conculsion is the review and summary of the thesis, and again emphasizes that it is still a painstaking and time-taking task to achieve cultural equivalence in translation.