Translation Strategies Of Relic Illustration In Chongqing Three Gorges Museum

With the rapid development of Chongqing City and its increasing opening-up to the outside world, there are more and more contacts between the local culture of Chongqing (the local culture) and the foreign cultures. Translation plays a more and more important role in the contact and communication between different cultures. Since language and culture are inseparate and interdependent, translation is not only the bridge to transfer information between languages, but also link communications between cultures. Nowadays English has became the common international language on the earth, cultures (including those of foods, tour site, relics and so on) in Bayu area (the local regions), especially those represented by relic illustration in the Chongqing Three Gorges Museum, have been translated into English or introduced in English. To a certain extent, the communication between cultures is more important than the language itself in translation. Language and culture are intricately related, translation is not merely transference of two languages but ultimately that of two cultures. Therefore, cultural translation must transfer cultural information of the source texts.Relic illustration contains different cultural information, so the translating of relic illustration is a very important part of cultural transference. It plays the role of spreading the local culture in Chongqing and it is the media of intercommunication between the local people and foreign people. So in order to translate them well, translators must not only master knowledge of relics in the history, but also compare the cultural differences between Chongqing and foreign countries, and gain more understanding of cultural connotation of relics. They must try their best to keep the cultural characters of the origin during the procedure of translation. Only by doing this can the translator come to his aims of translating the relic in the Chongqing Three Gorges Museum, and let foreigners know more about Chongqing City.As an action of human being, translation has its particular purpose. The translation intention is one of the important decisive factors for translators to choose a translation strategy. From the cultural perspective, there are two strategies in the translation of relic illustration: domestication and foreignization. The former is TL culture-oriented (target-language- culture-oriented), which employs the target culture and target language to make the translation easy to read and more acceptable. On the contrary, the latter is SL-culture-oriented (source-language-culture-oriented), which strives to preserve as much as possible the original flavor in order to retain the foreignness of the source language culture.Translators should preserve the culture and promote the communication between nations. There were numerous disputes over these two strategies both in Chongqing and in the west in the history of translation. In these disputes people tend to consider the two strategies as a binary opposition, arguing for one and against the other, and the result is that either side seems reasonable in their own argument, so an agreement is difficult to reach. The two translation strategies are not contradictory but complementary to each other in the translating process, especially in the process of translating relic illustration. On practice of translation, there is no foreignization without some degree of domestication. By the same way, there is no domestication without some degree of foreignization. Translated material can be domesticated or foreignized to different extents, and hence to placed somewhere along the domestication-foreignization continuum. Therefore both of them should be equally used when translating relic illustration.After analyzing several aspects of translation, namely the purpose of translation, faithfulness to the source, readers'expectation, the enrichment of language and culture and the promotion of cultural exchange, the author of this thesis comes to the conclusion that translators should choose the proper translation strategies in the translation of Chongqing City. It is of great significance to study domestication or foreignization in the translation of Chongqing Three Gorges Museum under the background of cultural exchange in the new century. The proper use of domestication and foreignization may help people from different cultures know and learn from each other. Based on the previous studies of other researchers and the author's research of this thesis tries to clear the definitions and sense of domestication and foreignization, so that such a clarification should benefit later studies and provide translators with some help in their translation practice.