Probe Into China’s Foreign Publicity Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Vacancy

As an important part of cultural system, language reflects the culture of anationality. What the translators should deal with is not only the differences betweenlanguages, but also the cultural vacancies which are specific characteristics to oneculture but not another.Aiming at spreading Chinese culture, the qualified foreign publicity materialsare able to deliver comprehensive information to foreigners. The rich culturalconnotations in the publicity materials are shaped by various factors, such as nationalpsychology, customs, religion, geographical environments and so on. It is difficult fornon-native speakers to understand the cultural-specific impressions.It is of great importance of make a research of the cultural information in foreignpublicity materials. In this thesis, the cultural vacancy phenomenon is explored byclassifying it into five kinds: linguistic cultural vacancy, ecological cultural vacancy,material cultural vacancy, social cultural vacancy and religious cultural vacancyaccording to the classification of vacancy made by Russian psycholinguistics JurijSorokin and Irins Markovina and the five types of sub-culture in cross-culturalcommunication made by Nida. Then the deep reasons resulting to cultural vacancy arediscussed. By analyzing concrete examples at the word, sentence and discourse levels,the thesis intends to explore how to realize the best choice about Chinese culturalelements in the process of translation in order to tackle the barriers caused by culturalvacancy and achieve ideal communication.Form the discussion, the conclusions are arrived at:(1) The geographical factor,religious factor and thought pattern factor are the main reasons resulting in culturalvacancy.(2) Both the language and the cultural connotations language carries shouldbe considered in the course of translation.(3) The cultural information is varied andcomplex, but the two notions of Nida’s functional equivalence theory may be ameasure of how well the translation strategies work.