On The Translation Of Cultural Features In Local Literature And Its Influencing Factors

Cultural words, also known as "empty words", are words or phrases deeply rooted in the culture and values associated with the source language but are not part of( the cultural context of the target language. Due to the differences in ecology, linguistic, religious, material and social cultures, a language, in contrast to another, may have numerous cultural words. And these words will undoubtedly give rise to great difficulties in translation. The case is particularly true with the Chinese-English translation, because Chinese and English belong to different language families, and China is tens of thousands of miles from England, where English originates. Since the interaction between China and the western countries becomes more and more frequent, translation, the translation of cultural words included, has become an important part of our life. And works and papers on the strategies of cultural translation just spring up. In Section 1, a review of the study of cultural-word translation will be given. As for the strategies on how to translate cultural words, Section 2 will demonstrate them in detail. But to know the categories of cultural words and their translation strategies are far from enough; after all, they cannot match with each other automatically. To translate cultural words properly, plenty of factors should be taken into consideration. And certain criteria should be introduced to assess the propriety of the translation. These are what missed in other people’s work. And I will make an initial discussion about them in Section 3.