On Influence Of Translator’s Cultural Identity Upon Translation

Translation is a special and complicated human activity with a long history,aiming to benefit human beings and meeting the need of different groups. Since thethird scientific and technical revolution, globalization and pluralism has become atrend so that there is an increasing need of translation gradually. Since the70s of the20thcentury as a discipline, translation studies rooted in society and culture has takeninto shape and developed more and more deeply and widely. Cultural studies havealso been paid much more attention to and translation theories came into being andenlarged the academic field from various perspectives, to name a few, feminism,deconstructionism and post-colonialism, etc. like flowers blossoming colorfully andbrilliantly. People have been becoming conscious that translation is more thecommunication and collision of different cultures than the technical transferring oftwo languages. Consequently, it is manipulated and influenced by diverse culturalfactors.With the cultural turn of translation studies, the translator as a key role oftranslation has been accepted and put emphasis on from the invisible standpoint tothat of the visible, and treated as a vital academic focus for academic research. Thetranslator, in the in-between status and capable of dealing with language and culture,shoulders the task of communication resembling a bridge.This thesis points out that translator’s cultural identity is closely related to hisor her translated works, finding expressions in the understanding of the source text orthe style and wording of the targeted renderings and so on. The text chosen for thisthesis is Peter Hessler’s book called River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which hastwo versions in Chinese, one published by Taiwan Jiuzhou Publishing House in2006and the other by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in2012. Although the twotranslators have been both immersed in Chinese culture, the historical situation wasthat Kuomintang once retreated to Taiwan and dominated it and, as a result, Taiwan and the Mainland had been ruled by two different systems of economy, politics andculture. Consequently, their translated versions of River Town are different, too. Thethird and fourth chapter are going to delve into how translator’s mainstream identityand nonmainstream identity influence during the decoding and encoding stage oftranslating.The thesis makes a profound analysis of translator’s cultural identity betweenthe translator of Taiwan and that of the Mainland. By study, it is found out that in spiteof the fact the two translators are from the same Chinese cultural circle they havedifferent cultural identity due to political, economic and etc. distinctions and thus theirworks show different styles and colors, to be specific, the addition and distortion ofthe original text, usage of dialect and semantic prosody.