Cultural Loss In Translation

Culture has been defined by many people. Different definitions describe culture from different perspectives. Varied as the definitions are, similarity can still been drawn from them: culture is an all-inclusive system and is unique to a certain society. But after study we find that only all-inclusiveness and uniqueness are far from enough to describe culture, though having some truth in them. Universality and pseudo universality are complementary in describing culture. Cultural universality makes translation possible; cultural uniqueness or nationality make translation difficult; pseudo universality, which is the feature of partial commonness and partial uniqueness, is always hard to detect and eludes translator's eyes, and thus give rise to errors.When coming across culture in translation, to translate is a question, but to translate adequately is quite another, because loss when translating from one language into another is seemingly inevitable. This thesis, trying to enquire into the question from the angle of culture which, in most cases, is the chief contributors to the loss, analyses culture and translation respectively to find the relationship between them and probes into the ways that culture causes loss in translation, finding that cultural nationality and pseudo universality are the main reasons that cause the loss. At last, the thesis summarizes the methods and strategies to compensate the cultural loss in translation.