Translation Strategies Restricted By Cultural Factors

The aim and characteristics of translation are to exchange thoughts and culture. Culturalfactors emerge from the confrontation of cultural settlements in the process of translatingfrom one language to another, making it impossible to capture again the relationship of thesource text to the source culture. The ways of beliefs, thinking, values and attitudes ofdifferent cultures pose headaches to translation theorists and translators who are trying tobridge the gaps between SL text and TL text. Translation is not merely a linguistic activity,but essentially a means of cultural communication. Therefore, in translation, the principle ofseeking the common ground while reserving differences should be practiced and translationshould reflect the alien things in a strange land that are expressed in the original. This thesisapproaches to the problems of cultural factors that affecting the Chinese translation of thebook Etiquette for Dummies and attempts to provide some feasible explanations for themethods and theories of translation. Of central importance is the conclusion that translation isa continuous process that always has its intercultural background, that different strategies andtechniques are all governed by the variations of social and cultural conditions.