An Exploration Of The Covert Culture In Arthur Waley’s Translated Work Monkey

About one hundred years ago, someone ever predicated that there would be no cultural differences in the world as all nations will melt into integrity which caused by future’s highly-developed ways of communication. However, only half of his predication, the highly-developed ways of communication through people with different culture ground, is realized today. Compared with the past, ways of communication have been greatly upgraded. While, there is no evidence that nations will melt into integrity without cultural differences. In contrast, conflicts and cooperation in contemporary are more complex than the situation in hundreds years ago. In terms of people’s ideas, it tends to be increasingly plural, compared with the past. The reason of irreconcilable difference is each nation’s exclusive culture systems. Culture is the root of a nation’s philosophical thinking and the way of living. Meanwhile, as the carrier and reflection of culture, language is deeply cleaved with cultural elements. Human beings communicate through the changing of linguistic sign, while translation is the necessary means to communicate over the linguistic barriers. However, in the process of translation, the cultures both in source language and target language, especially the parts of covert cultures, are changed inevitably. Therefore, it seems that the communication is successfully achieved, while the reality is that the full and equal communication is not achieved, as there are numerous cultural conflicts and compromises in it. The thesis is to discover the insurmountable covert culture in translation from the perspectives of Chinese and Western philosophical thinking, social structure, and religious concept by taking a case study of the translated work Monkey by Arthur Waley. Meanwhile, intertextuality is adopted to explore the Orientalism hidden in translation. Through the exploration of covert culture, the conclusion that texts related to covert cultural factors are “untranslatable” can be made. From this sense, this thesis aims to provide some reference and thinking to translation and cultural study. Furthermore, the means of taking translation as a media to examine cultures and studying cultures throughout translation can promote the theoretical study of translation from “technique” to “theory”. And, implementing the philosophical thinking under the cultural system to translation study can also upgrade the translation study from “experience” to “transcendence”.