Transplantation Of Cultural Seeds In C-E Translation Of Museum Relic Annotation Texts

Cultural exchanges among countries are becoming more and more frequent than ever before. Museums as an important carrier of culture play a significant role in showing one country’s soft strength and promoting domestic culture to the world. For China, a rapidly developing country reputed as ancient civilization with a long history, museums are invaluable resources for trans-cultural communication. In most Chinese museums, relic annotation texts are supplied with English parallel texts for the convenience of foreign visitors in their attempt to appreciate and understand Chinese history and culture. Thus, the quality of English translation of relic annotation texts plays an important role in cultural exchange between China and other countries.For quite a long time translation studies tended to focus on linguistic comparative studies and analyze translation process from the perspective of linguistics. Although this kind of research possessed high level of scientific elements and subjectivity, it tended to be prescriptive by nature and was aimed at exploring ways to achieve total equivalence without sufficient attention paid to effective communication across culture. Andre Lefevere(1976) proposed that translation study should exist as an independent subject. Susan Bassnett (1980) argued further that translation studies should view translation on the level of culture rather than texts. The appearance of cultural translation theory makes a major breakthrough in translation studies and broadens the research horizons.This paper selects museum relic annotation texts in three museums of Jiangsu province as research object and tries to analyze the transplantation of cultural seeds in C-E translation from the perspective of Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory. It aims to show the directional significance of cultural translation theory to the translation of culture-loaded words. Through case analysis of selected examples, the paper draws the conclusion that in keeping with cultural translation theory, translators might benefit from adopting the foreignization-first and domestication-second principle in their translation efforts aimed at cultural exchange. Due to the specialization and complexity of the culture seeds, its translation should be flexible. These methods include literal translation with paraphrase, liberal translation, omission and so on.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter one gives a general introduction of the objective and the significance of this study, as well as the structure of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review which introduces characteristics of museum relic annotation texts and current researches on it both at home and abroad. Chapter three presents the theoretical background in detail, mainly the theory of cultural translation proposed by Susan Bassnett. Chapter four offers case analysis by adopting Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory in them. Chapter five is the conclusion which discusses the limitations and significance of this study, summarizes experiences that come from this translation practice and presents some tentative ideas for further study in the future.