A Study Of Chinese American Literature Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Presupposition

Chinese American literature as an important branch of American literature depicts life experiences of Chinese American people and their descendents in America. It has become a vigorous literature field in American literary circle since the 1960 s. Authors of Chinese American literature are those Chinese born in America or those who are educated in America. Thus Chinese American literature takes on a feature of cultural hybridity combining Chinese traditional culture with American culture owing to the dual ethnic identity of Chinese American writers. With the development of Chinese American literature, scholars begin to pay attention to this emerging literature and The Joy Luck Club, one of the masterpieces of Amy Tan who is the famous Chinese American writer has become the focus of these researches. However, studies on the translation of Chinese American literature are relatively scare compared with studies from literary perspective. Furthermore, most of these papers pay attention to concrete translation strategies or cultural translation and back-translation and few from the perspective of cultural presupposition.Cultural presupposition is an important branch of pragmatic presupposition and is defined as the cultural background knowledge, such as underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ideas shared by the members of the society. As different societies take on different cultural presuppositions, the transmission of different cultural presuppositions becomes vital for the translation of Chinese American literature which is concerned with bidirectional cultural transference.Based on these study backgrounds, this thesis employs qualitative analysis to study the translation of Chinese American literature on account of cultural presupposition and thoroughly analyzes the embodiment and feasibility of cultural presupposition in the translation of hybrid texts, taking The Joy Luck Club as an example. Based on the comparative analysis of the original text and the three translation versions by a large number of examples, this thesis finds that Cheng Naishan prefers free translation and rewriting to keep the fluency of her translation, while Tian Qing prefers literal translation. However, Yu Renrui combines these two kinds of translation strategy. Besides, this thesis finds that cultural presupposition is closely related to cultural context and both of them are the main factors resulting in cultural misreading and mistranslation. On the basis of textual analysis, this thesis discovers that the construction of cultural context of Chinese American literature is the premise of understanding cultural presupposition during the translation. After that, some specific translation strategies are presupposed to deal with the difficulties in the translation of cultural presupposition. Borrowing is used to supplement the semantic gap in the translation of linguistic cultural presupposition to preserve the stylistic and cultural feature. Omission is useful in the translation of material cultural presupposition, social and ideological cultural presupposition familiar to Chinese readers which can make the translation precise with cultural color. Annotation can be applied as cultural compensation in the foreignization of western cultural element and the domestication of Chinese cultural elements.