A Study Of The Chinese To English Translation Of Publicity Material For Silk Products From The Perspective Of Cultural Translation Theory

China’s rapid development of economy and the trend of internationalization lead to an increasing demand for the quality publicity material of silk products for foreign audience. At the moment, as translating publicity material of silk products from Chinese to English plays an important role in connecting China with other countries in the world, the quality the publicity material exerts a great influence on the effect of the international communication, which not only directly determines whether the enterprise can occupy a good position in the competitive market and create substantial profits, but also influences China’s image abroad and her cultural communication with western countries. It is of great practical significance to study Chinese to English translation of publicity materials of silk products. However, previous researches in this field were focused on summarizing translation methods or skills, which may have neglected the Chinese culture capital in the publicity material.With the development of the studies on translation theory and practice, translators and scholars are aware of the relationship of translation studies and other disciplines, especially culture. Culture, as a whole of social and historical phenomena, has played a more and more significant role in globalization and cross-cultural communication. Since the emergence of cultural turn in translation studies, translation is no longer regarded as merely a linguistic translation, but a cultural communication essentially. More and more scholars have begun their researches from the perspective of culture, thus forming the cultural translation theory, Susan Bassnett has put forward the complete and systematic view of cultural translation. Cultural translation view is that the culture should be considered as the basic unit in translation and the purpose for translation is to transfer the culture through realizing the functional equivalence of culture. There are different cultural backgrounds, religions, literature and history, thinking patterns, values and so on. The cultural differences may cause contradictions, or even conflicts, so according to the cultural translation view, the translators ought to make clear the differences in language system and communication style, and then take the culture as unit to translate the text with high quality. The cultural translation theory provides a brand-new way for translation studies which is of great significance.The author of the thesis chooses the translation of culture-loaded publicity material for silk products as the object of the study, aiming at discussing how to export Chinese culture in translating publicity material for silk products from Chinese into English, illustrating the practical value of cultural translation view and its guiding significance on dealing with cultural vacancy in the translation process, and understanding the advantages of cultural translation strategy. Apart from that, the author of the thesis also attempts to demonstrate the fact that the Chinese culture in the publicity material for silk products can be transferred into foreign cultures or constructed there to some extent in order to promote the development of cultural transmission and cross-cultural communication much better.In this thesis, the qualitative analysis is applied to studying the cultural interaction in the translation practice. Firstly, based on the fact whether the cultural capital in the publicity material for silk products has been transmitted successfully, the transmission of the culture in publicity material for silk products can be classified into three types: successful cultural capital transmission, part of culture capital lost and all culture capital lost. Secondly, a comparative study is made between the Chinese and English texts and during the comparison it is found that some cultural capital has been fully transmitted into English-speaking countries, and the success should be partly attributed to the adoption of the four main translation rules as addition, omission, explanatory note and rewriting. Thirdly, it is concluded that the circulation of cultural capital would presumably promote cultural construction and interaction.