A Study On The English Translation Of Shaanxi Cultural Information In Greenwood Riverside From The Perspective Of Cultural Translation Theory

In recent years, as the translation study and culture increasingly develop, more and more scholars are inclined to concentrate on the cultural factors in translation, especially the importance of the local cultural characteristics and cultural contexts. Susan Bassnett is the most outstanding one among the numerous wonderful translation theorists. The cultural translation theory Bassnett puts forward promotes the translation study towards a new stage.Taking Greenwood Riverside, an old town in Shaanxi Province as the background, Greenwood Riverside follows the legendary story about Wei Futang, a local bandit, and describes the regional customs, the folklores and the natural landscapes in Greenwood Riverside from the turbulence times before 1949 to today’s reform and opening-up period. It is a long historical novel spanning 50 years of history. The English version of Greenwood Riverside maintains the Shaanxi local features, reflects the history and social reality at that time. It is a wonderful literary work of great research significance.Bassnett believes that translation is not a simple word decoding and recoding process, but an internal communication between cultures. Translation equivalence essentially refers to the functional cultural equivalence between the source language and the target language. In this thesis, Shaanxi cultural information in Greenwood Riverside will be divided into four categories:1) the ecological cultural information; 2) the material cultural information; 3) the social cultural information; 4) the spiritual cultural information. Taking Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory as the theoretical guidance and taking numerous translations of Shaanxi cultural information in Greenwood Riverside for example, this thesis interprets the practical value of cultural translation theory as well as its guiding significance in solving the cultural vacancy in the translation process. The author draws the following conclusions:The main culture embodied in Greenwood Riverside is Shaanxi local culture which could be instructed with cultural translation theory and could be translated in transliteration, foreignization, domestication and etc. In spite of some defects in translating Shaanxi cultural information, the English version of Greenwood Riverside is still successful translation and reflects the cultural translatability.