A Study Of Cultural Mistranslation From The Perspective Of Cultural Translation Theory

In the late 1980s, there appeared a new turn in the translation field, called "Culture Turn". "Culture" began to show itself in front of the scholars as an essential element which drived more and more scholars to realize the fact that the analyses of a version cannot simply focus on the lingual equivalence. Translation is not completed in the vacuum but in some certain social and cultural contexts. There are no two languages or two cultures that are exactly the same. Therefore, mistranslation owns its inevitability and rationality, and it is of special signifigance for the author of this thesis to make a study of mistranslation, too.The author of this thesis makes a study of mistranslation, taking the collected mistranslations and the version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Zhang Guruo as its corpora, on the basis of the Cultural Translation Theory by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere. The author divides mistranslation into three types:One type is caused by translators'carelessness. Another type is caused by translators'poor foundation in language. Still another type is related to "culture", which is called cultural mistranslation. As the main research object, cultural mistranslation is further classified as unintentional cultural mistranslation and intentional cultural mistranslation. First, the author makes an analysis of the unintentional cultural mistranslation in the aspects of culture vacancy and culture mismatch. By means of a comparative study, the author has found that the culture vacancy involves material culture vacancy, conceptual culture vacancy and behavioral culture vacancy while the culture mismatch involves referential mismatch, emotional mismatch and thinking pattern mismatch. Second, the author places Zhang Guruo's version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which enjoys the name of a "faithful version", under the context of intentional cultural mistranslation and analyzes the cultural "mistranslations" in the version from the perspective of Manipulation Theory in terms of the ideological, poetic and patronage manipulations. This thesis aims at illustrating the point that we shouldn't take a passive attitude toward the unintentional cultural mistranslation, but we should try to improve our cultural qualities and reduce the production of unintentional cultural mistranslation while taking cultural mistranslation as an exchange and clash of different cultures. As for the intentional cultural mistransaltion, we should realize that there is no absolutely faithful version and regard the intentional cultural mistranslation as a translation strategy instead of limiting ourselves to criticizing a version simply at a textual level.