A Study On Translated Version Of The Pisan Cantos From The Perspective Of Cultural Presupposition

This dissertation begins with the main idea of The Cantos and studies the soletranslated version of The Pisan Cantos by Huang Yunte in Chinese to probe intowhether the Cultural Presupposition Translation is proper or not on the basis of theclose relationship between cultural presupposition and translation. Culturalpresupposition is something that goes without saying during communication. Itincludes mutual knowledge backgrounds of both communication sides. Owing tohuge cultural differences between source language and target language, translators areliable to make the translation tactless or even make mistakes if cultural presuppositionin source language is not fully grasped and comprehended. Therefore, culturalpresupposition plays a vital part in translation. Though Pound was put into prison bytreason because of his anti-Semitism and advocating of Mussolini, his contributions toAmerican literature and culture are indelible. And his epic The Cantos is marvelous.As scarce abstruse writing in American literature history, The Cantos has been alwaysthe focus of study by a lot of scholars because of its unintelligibility andcomprehensive contents.In this dissertation, the author tries to study the Chinese version of The PisanCantos by Huang Yunte from the perspective of cultural presupposition. As a branchof pragmatics, cultural presupposition is now applied in translation like advertisementtranslation, scientific translation and literature translation, etc. Without enoughknowledge of cultural presupposition, translator can easily misunderstand culturalpresupposition in original text which will probably result in mistranslations and evenmistakes during translation. In a word, translators should strengthen their culturalawareness and comprehension of source text, thus then they can righteously expresscultural presupposition of original text in translation as well as promote cross-culturecommunication. This dissertation is started with theoretical concept of cultural presupposition todiscuss the main ideas or paradise in detail that presented in The Cantos and alsostudy the close relationship between cultural presupposition and translation. Theauthor finds out some problems after a profound study of the source text and Huang’stranslated version of The Pisan Cantos. Some evidences show that Mr. Huang who isthe translator of The Pisan Cantos is not totally familiar with cultural presuppositionin source text when he did the translation. So there are some improper translatedversions in his translation. At the end of this dissertation, three ways of how totranslate cultural presupposition are put forward on the basis of the previous studies inorder to solve the problems raised in this dissertation.The conclusion of this dissertation lies in the following aspects. Firstly,translators could strengthen the awareness of cultural presupposition of the originaltext and fully understand the main idea and at the same time considering the themethat is delivered in the original work in order to deal well with cultural presuppositionin The Cantos during translation. Secondly, translators could also use some techniquesto find out the most applicable translated ways considering differences of culturalpresupposition between two different languages, thus can help translators describe thecharacteristics of the “paradise” that Pound had sought for many years and eliminatethe vacuum of meaning during reading. It also can maintain semantic coherence inorder to achieve the aim of disseminating the national culture. The ultimate goal ofthis dissertation is to help researchers understand The Cantos better in futureresearches and also to make a useful reference for future translation of The Cantos.