A Study Of Cultural Presupposition And Its Translation In Big Breasts And Wide Hips

Culture presupposition refers to the mutual cultural knowledge, which needs no further explanation in communication. Culture presupposition is an indispensible factor in transferring certain information that is specific in certain cultural context especially in literary works, which not only forms the basis of successful communication, but also helps to reflect certain writing style of the author and shows the historical, social and cultural background of the book. In this sense, a correct interpretation and translation of cultural presupposition is critical in reproducing the original meaning of the ST. Therefore, cultural presupposition deserves attention by the translator. However, it poses a dilemma for the translator that to replant the cultural presupposition in target text to the best is most necessary on one hand, then it turns out to be a really tough job to find an exact correspondence in one culture as in another on the other hand, and it is not always a good choice to transfer all the cultural presuppositions in the TT which may likely make an intriguing novel reads like a dictionary. Thus the study of cultural presupposition and its translation will carry a great weight in translation studies. As there is no universal translation strategy for cultural presupposition, so a contrastive study of a successful case can help to provide us some insights.Against this background, this thesis is making a contrastive study of cultural presupposing and its translation in Big Breasts and Wide Hips, mainly by describing the presupposed information in the original text and carrying on to make an analysis of its English version, then a discussion is made on Goldblatt’s translation strategy in translating cultural presupposition.