Allusion Translation In Fortress Besieged From Perspective Of Cultural Functional Equivalence

As the cultural awareness gradually awakes in translation studies and the influence of Poly-system Theory on translation studies increasingly deepens, scholars of translation studies pay more and more attention to cultural element in translation and they regard translation as a cultural phenomenon and a kind of cross-cultural communication activities from the perspective of cultural turn, which not only profoundly reveals the cultural attributes of translation, but also makes learned men focus on the external restricting factors in the process of translating, as well as the function and the influence. Cultural turn in translation studies compensates for the shortage that scholars of the previous translation school only paid attention to the language attribute. To sum up, cultural turn promotes the prosperity of the contemporary translation studies. In the numerous scholars in cultural translation studies, a British translation theorist named Susan Bassnett, whose cultural functional equivalence theory offers a new perspective for the study of cultural translation. In Bassnett’s view, translation is a kind of cultural transfer, a cultural exchange in two languages. Besides, translation is a communication between internal and two different cultures. As for translation equivalence, she thinks that the equivalence in cultural function between the original language and the target language is very important, and the key to the above equivalence is to focus on the fact that readers of the target language can achieve the same effect as readers in the original language.As is known to all, allusions are rooted in historical and cultural soil, which contains the abundant background knowledge and the extended meanings, but due to the cultural attributes that allusions inherently have, allusion translation has long been considered as one of the difficult problems in literary translation studies. Fortress Besieged written by Ch’ien Chung-shu is a marvelous full-length novel with considerable literary value. In this book, a number of allusions are employed to portray the character, shape the image and deepen the theme.Based on Susan Bassnett’s theory, the equivalence in allusion translation should follow major rules of cultural functional equivalence. So in this thesis, an analysis has been made to study allusions which are originated from four different sources:history, literature, fables, social customs and folk legends. The aim of the above analysis is to observe the gain and the loss in allusion translation of Fortress Besieged under guidance of the theory of cultural functional equivalence. Finally, a conclusion has been drawn in this thesis, which contains four points, translation methods of allusions which are derived from history is mainly literal translation plus annotation, and the results have achieved functional equivalence in culture. The translation results of allusions which are originated from literature do not have problems in cultural functional equivalence. Literal translation is mainly used to translate allusions, which are derived from fables, including traditional Chinese fables and Aesop’s Fables. Besides, free translation is primarily used to deal with allusions that are rooted in social customs and folklores and both of them have realized functional equivalence in culture. In a word, under guidance of cultural functional equivalence, it is wish to make a little contribution to allusion translation studies through analyzing allusion translation methods in the version of Fortress Besieged.