Translator As Medium Of Cultural Transmission

As the “going global” strategy has been carried out in China,the translation of Chinese literary works,a prominent means to promoting the dissemination of Chinese culture,has gained lots of attention from scholars at home.Translators,bridging two cultures as well as languages,play a significant role in cultural exchanges.However,according to André Lefevere,translators are constrained by the dominant ideology and poetics of the target culture or those of the translators themselves in the translation process.And it is based on this concept that he put forward the rewriting theory,considering “translation as rewriting”.But he also mentioned that translators may decide to or not to accept the constraints.Therefore,the exertion of translators’ subjectivity in the process of translation may have an important impact on the transmission of the culture that is embodied in the original text.Jie Mi(Decoded),written by Mai Jia,has achieved great success after being translated into English by Milburn and Payne.And it is the first modern Chinese novel to be listed in the Penguin Classics Library.The novel is a combination of genre fiction and pure literature,and it has the characteristics of a spy novel,vanguard novel,historical novel,family novel,etc.reflecting the Chinese culture from various aspects.Its popularity in western countries represents a success of the going global of Chinese culture.But according to the Rewriting theory,some of the cultural factors must be blocked while some others imported.The thesis tries to find out what and how some cultural factors are blocked as well as imported through translation.The findings of the thesis are as follows:Firstly,Cultural factors that violate the ideology of the target culture are hardly imported,but translators tend to import the political-ideological factors in which the western readers are greatly interested,and some philosophical factors are introduced to provide novelty.Secondly,translators are less constrained by poetics than by ideology,the narrative style of the novel,some figures of speech,and most of the allusions are translated both in form and meaning.But some cultural factors are lost in retaining the poetic form.Poetic rewritings are mainly about historical writing and the idioms.The former is to bring the story closer to historical facts,and the latter is often done by replacing the original idioms with similar idioms in the target culture.Thirdly,translators’ subjectivity is reflected in the selection of the text to be translated and in the importing of the cultural factors of the source text.The translators’ own cultural and ideological affiliations,translation ethics,their prejudgment of the target readers’ acceptability,and their subjective aesthetics affect the importing of the cultural factors in the source text.This study explores the role that translators play as a medium of cultural transmission in the process of translation,and it aims to provide some reference for future “out-going” translation practices at home.