Approaching Cultural Blanks In The English Version Of Chinese Classics

From1980s, culture turn has taken an important part in translation studies. Translation studies are no longer restricted to the linguistic level, but connected with historical factors, cultural factors, social factors, etc. Translation is no longer viewed as transmission of languages as before, but a delivery of cultures. From the perspective of cultural translation theory, the aim of translation is to achieve the cultural exchange. In the practice of translation, the phenomenon that some culture in original language cannot be translated into the target language, or the readers of target language cannot understand is called cultural blank by Russian theorist Sorokin.As one of the most remarkable representatives of Chinese tea classics, The Classic of Tea is filled with typical Chinese traditional cultural elements. It has attracted attentions from scholars home and abroad ever since its coming into being. This thesis chooses The Classic of Tea and its translation from Professors Jiang Xin and Jiang Yi published in the series of Library of Chinese Classics as the case study. Through the cultural translation theory, the author will try to find out the translation methods to deal with the cultural blanks in English version.Comparing the original work with its English version, the author finds that there do exist cultural blanks. Based on the classification of culture, cultural blanks in The Classic of Tea can be divided into five categories:ecological cultural blanks, material cultural blanks, social cultural blanks, religious cultural blanks and linguistic cultural blanks. After analyzing the selected examples and their translations, the author comes to a conclusion that transliteration, literal translation, contextual amplification, conversion, paraphrase and annotation all have flexible application in dealing with the cultural blanks in translation. Furthermore, transliteration added with annotation, literal translation and contextual amplification are used in more cases.The author finally finds out that reserving the blanks, adding annotation and interpreting the blanks are the three main strategies to fill in cultural blanks.