A Study Of Russian Version Of “A Small Town Called Hibiscus” In The Frame Of Cultural-Oriented Approach

At present,the Chinese people are working hard to realize the Chinese Dream of the great national rejuvenation.In order to achieve this ambitious goal,the government has taken a series of major measures,has made great achievements,and encountered great challenges and obstacles.Russia is China’s comprehensive strategic partner of coordination,and it is very important for Russia to support China in international politics,international trade,regional stability and world peace.As the saying goes,“the key to state-to-state relations is in amity between the people,and the key to the amity is in heart-to-heart communication”.For this purpose,the Chinese government has vigorously promoted the project of “cultural translation”,and many translators have devoted themselves to the work of cultural translation.However,unfortunatelly in this wave of translation many problems have been exposed.One of them is the loss,misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the cultural load in literary translation,which is caused by the lack of understanding of the starting point of “cultural translation”.Aiming at this problem,this study uses the basic theory of “cultural translation”,selects the novel “A Small Town Called Hibiscus” by the Mao Dun prize winner Gu Hua to compare with it’s only Russian version 《В долине лотосов》 made by two famous Russian sinologists Semanov and Sorokin.The paper is based on the “from practice to practice” principle and investigates the translation of all the words and phrases with cultural load in Semanov’s version of translation,analyzes the reasons for their success or failure.The descriptive translation strategy emphasizes the respect for the form and content of the original work,and tries to use the principles of literal translation and “alienation” to translate literary works.However,while literary translation we need to face many problems caused by language and cultural differences.In case of absence of equivalent linguistic means between the source language and the target language,and in the absence of common origins or sufficient integration between the two cultures,the cultural symbols and cultural connotations of the source language are conveyed through descriptive,supplementary,annotating and imitation translating strategies.It is worth mentioning that there are some phenomena with rhythmic characteristics in the works,such as folk songs,proverbs,such as xiehouyu.This is not only a difficult part in the translation of the novel,but also a special place to reflect it’s cultural characteristics.In order to verify the translation strategies and methods we summarized and retranslated all the “Wedding songs” in the novel.Retranslation shows that descriptive translation strategy can basicly solve the problems of cultural translation.This paper includes introduction,five chapters,conclusion and appendix.In the introduction,we point out the purpose and value of this research,review the research status of “cultural translation” in Europe,Russia and China,and comment on the translation research status of “A small town…”.We clarified cultural information and its connection with translation.In the first chapter,we introduce the working background of the original work and translation,made a brief introduction of the author and the translators’ biography and historical background.Chapters two to four are focused on the three cultural levels of the novel(i.e.: material level,behavioral level and consciousness level)and its related translation levels(i.e.,vocabulary,sentences and chapters).In addition,in the fourth chapter,we specially analyze the translation characteristics of the Chinese provebs of the novel.The fifth chapter briefly introduces the skills of Russian translation of Chinese poetry and sorts out and retranslates the poems of “Wedding songs”.In our opinion,the retranslation of poetry from the perspective of cultural connotation is one of the innovations of this study.