A Study Of Cultural Vacancy In Interpreting From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Culture is the bearer of the massive specific information of a nation and a longhistorical tradition, each nation has its own specific cultural connotation, whichforms the distinct language of each nation to express their messages. While languageis the carrier and foundation of culture through which the history of humancivilization and social progress are recorded and it is also the important means forcultural expression and transmission. Therefore, language contributes to thecommunication, transmission and evolution of culture. The language of each nationhas a further tie with its own culture. Language is an important component of culture,culture contains and influences language, and culture reflects the characteristics ofthe nation. Usually, language is embedded with special cultural characteristics, andeach nation attaches different connotations to language since they have differences inliving environment, manners and customs, social history, religious culture and theexternal world. So there are dissimilarities and similarities in different nationalcultures. And the differences in culture often lead to the misunderstanding of thesource language or to the wrong transformation in translation and interpreting. So itis quite necessary for the translator and interpreter to deal with the culture factorsseriously. But in this thesis, it mainly focuses on interpreting, so different culturefactors and various cultural characteristics create the splendid cultures among nations,but at the same time they bring about a large number of cultural vacancy which causethe difficulty in interpreting. This paper mainly discusses the phenomenon of culturalvacancy in the interpreting between Chinese and English and focuses on the featuresand performances of the phenomenon. This paper is about cultural vacancy ininterpreting and its solutions. The author hopes that these solutions to the problemscaused by cultural vacancy can be helpful to interpreting practice. It comparesdifferent cultural connotations of expressions in English and Chinese. First of all, itanalyzes the following cases which are often found in interpreting: cultural background, non-equivalence, extension and intension, and derivation; and then itdescribes the Skopos Theory; at last, four main methods are proposed to solve thoseabove problems which are caused by cultural vacancy according to the SkoposTheory.