A Study Of The Cultural Mistranslations In The Return Of The Black Horse From The Perspective Of Susan Bassnett’s Cultural Translation Theory

Since ancient times, Xinjiang had the long history of interculturalcommunication. Different ethnic people with different cultural backgrounds camehere and multiplied. Their intercultural communications made the translation andwriting between different cultures flourished in Xinjiang. Among the ethnic minoritywriters the bilingual writers, who use the Chinese to describe the life and customs oftheir own culture had gained increasing attention, the Kazakh writer YerksyHurmanbek can be seen as a representative figure of this group. The year2010saw afilm called The Immortal Sheep based on her essay with the same name entered theFirst Films World Competition of the34thMontreal World Film Festival and becamethe only Chinese film that remained till the competition.In the same year her anthology Hei Ma Gui Qu was translated into English withthe title The Return of the Black Horse and published by the same publishing house asa part of “National Project for Introduction of Ethnic Minority Writers to theForeigners”. However, the two translators of this book was Han people coming fromthe inland part of China, they are not familiar with the Xinjiang Ethnic culture,especially the Kazakh culture. As a result the cultural translation appeared inevitably,which impaired the quality of the translation.The thesis was guided by Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory and can bedivided as following parts: first the author gives a brief introduction to Susan Bassnerrand her cultural translation theory, followed by a retrospect of the previous studies inhome and abroad; second the introduction to Yerksy Hurmanbek and the informationof The Return of the Black Horse; in the case study part the author analyzed thecultural mistranslations in The Return of the Black Horse and illustrated in thefollowing four aspects: a). ecological culture, b). social culture, c). material culture, d).linguistic culture, and e). religious culture.After the analysis the author gets the conclusion that the mistranslations in TheReturn of the Black Horse are expressed with the form of ossified word-to-wordtranslation, which were caused by the translators’ lack of background knowledge forthe Kazakh culture. Because Yerksy’s works have abundant cultural information, thistranslation will be viewed as a fail. Based on this conclusion the author believes the cultural information should be paid more attention in the future translation of theworks by other Xinjiang ethnic minority writers.