Review Of Positivist Descriptive Study Of Translation By Cultural School

The cultural school for translation studies emerged in the late 20th century. This school lays stress on the relationship between translation and the politics, culture and ideology of both source and target language societies, considering that the aim of translation is to realize the same function of translated text in the target culture just as the original text does in the source culture, and the focus of translation studies should no longer be limited to the equivalence problems, but should be extended to social and cultural issues directly or indirectly related to translation activities. Characteristic of collection, description and analysis of historical data, study of translation by cultural school belongs to positivist and descriptive study. On the basis of previous research on translation studies, this thesis will investigate the positivist descriptive features of studies by cultural school and illustrate the values and limitations of such methodology.Chapter One of this thesis deals with definitions and features of positivist and descriptive approaches and the application of both approaches to translation studies. Chapter Two gives a general description of representatives of cultural school and their corresponding theories, applying positivist analysis, deductive and inductive, and other methods to certain works and papers of Bassnett, Lefevere and Spivak, for a more profound discussion of the positivist descriptive nature of transition studies and a better comprehension of study methodology applied by this school. Chapter Three discusses values and limitations of positivist descriptive study of translation by cultural school. Finally, it comes to a conclusion that the positivist descriptive approach adopted by cultural school broadens the vision of translation studies and promotes translation studies to develop in a more scientific direction.All in all, the positivist descriptive study of translation by cultural school improves the scientific nature of translation studies as an independent discipline, and provides a new enlightenment for the development of this discipline.