On The Chinese Translation Of The Puritanic Factors In American Poetry From The Perspective Of Cultural Studies

Traditionally, translation has been regarded as a transfer process between twolanguages. Therefore, translation studies have mainly centered on linguistic analysisand parallel texts. In the1970s, translation studies made a breakthrough in itsdiversity; it was no longer restricted to the aesthetic or linguistic mode and became akind of cultural reflection. In the1990s, Bassnett and Lefevere combined the culturalstudies and translation studies and proposed the cultural turn of translation studies andthe translation turn of cultural studies. Chinese scholar Liu Miqing pointed out in hisOutline of Cultural Translation (2005) that cultural translation involved four keyissues, i.e., the exploration of cultural psychology, the interpretation of culturalmeaning, the analysis of cultural text and the expressive theory on cultural translation.American Puritanism which emigrated from Europe to North America in the17thcentury is the foundation of the mainstream culture of the USA, and plays a lastinglysignificant role in the field of people’s ideology. The rise of American poetry tookplace almost at the same time with the prevalence of American Puritanism which hasbecome the latent structure and internal form of American poetry. The introductionand translation of American poetry started late in China. In the process of translatingAmerican poetry, Chinese translators often made mistakes in translation due to thelack of cultural sensitivity of Puritanism, which not only produced hindrances incultural exchanges, but also deviated from the original intention of the cultural schoolto accomplish cultural coordination and development in the context of culturalglobalization.In this view, the author decides on the typical American cultural perspective-American Puritanism as her research perspective and encourages American poetrytranslators to place the source text against Puritan culture matrix to analyze. In thisway, their cultural awareness and ability will improve and the religious adaption isadopted into translation evaluation system; in the meanwhile, according to the fourkey issues in cultural translation raised by Liu, the author explores the translation mode and specific means to transfer the puritanic cultural factors in American poetry,which provides support in theory as well as in practice of the Chinese translation ofAmerican poetry.This paper has come up with the following results:1. This paper makes a diachronic study on the latent structure and internal formof American poetry—American Puritanism. It distinguishes the puritanic factors inAmerican poetry form the17thcentury until now into three aspects: the puritanicdoctrines, the secular spirits and moral reflections, illustrating how Puritan ethicsplays an ever lasting role in the form of collective unconscious in the field ofAmerican poetry and in face of this influence, what corresponding efforts the culturaltranslation school should make in translation.2. This paper offers measures in how to convey this latent structure and internalform in translation. According to the four key issues put forward by Liu Miqing, thispaper makes special efforts to study the semantic interpretation, text analysis,psychological exploration and expressive theory based on Puritanism. In the light ofthe main ideas and previous research of the cultural translation school, this paper alsoputs forward several specific translation approaches to translate the puritanic factorsin American poetry.