A Report On Translating Shanxi Merchants’ Courtyards Tourist Texts From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

This report analyzes the author’s translation practice from the perspective ofintercultural communication in order to explore the translating process and presentpractical strategies for translating Chinese into English, which would promote ShanxiMerchants’Culture in a more efficient way.Intercultural communication is not new for us and it aims at recognizing andaccommodating differences between cultures. And translation, being a typicalintercultural communication activity, requires a good intercultural awareness.Grounded on the precondition above, this report, with a exploration of the culturalelements in the texts and an analysis of the stylistic features of Chinese and Englishtourist texts, presents three strategies for translating: extraction of main points,concretization of expressions and combination of similarity and discrepancy, whichwould contribute to the mutual respect and understanding between Chinese andforeign cultures.However, using a foreign language to carry the culture of a nation is never easyand the most prominent problem is the “untranslatability” of culture. The translationof the tourist texts is no exception and the difficulties in translating are theuntranslatability of homophonic expressions, cultural images and artistic conceptions.In order to overcome these difficulties, the translator shall find out the ways in whichdifferent cultures resemble one another and the ways in which they differ and take thecontext and the tourists’acceptability into consideration. But these difficulties are alsothe blessings in disguise for translators and the discussion of culture’s translatabilityand untranslatability is just one of the most attractive and charming part of translationpractice. With the advancement of globalization and deepening of the interculturalcommunication, cultural translatability limitations are dwindling and translators, withthe help of intercultural awareness, would be able to turn much more culturally“untranslatable” into “translatable” phenomena and render much more “unsatisfactorytranslations” into “satisfactory translations”.