The Choice Of Cultural Translation Strategies

Each translation act is not only an inter-lingual transfer, but also a cross-cultural communicative activity, in which the translator chooses his cultural translation strategy to enable a successful cross-cultural communication. However, there’s no consensus on why to choose a cultural translation strategy, namely—what the constraints are on its choice.As regards to the debate on cultural translation strategies, this thesis holds that, both foreignization and domestication have their own features:foreignization, a source-language-oriented strategy, aims to retain the "foreignness" of the source text; while domestication, a target-language-oriented strategy, tends to achieve the naturalness and smoothness of the target language. In the process of translation, being influenced by the translator’s intention, text types, and target readers’background and expectation, translators tend to adopt different strategies, which are realized by means of word-for-word translation, transliteration, substitution, explication, annotation and omission.This thesis investigates the color words in Hong Lou Meng and its two English versions respectively by Yang Xianyi&Gladys Yang and David Hawkes&John Minford. It discusses about their strategies of translating color terms through a contrastive analysis, and on the influence of the translator’s intention, text type, target readership and the cultural background of translators as factors on the choice of translation strategies. Also, it proves that the Skopos theory is an efficient tool for translation theorists and practitioners in that the four factors are explicable with reference to the Skopos rule, the intertexual rule and the intratextual rule of the theory.