On Literary Translation In Modern China In Cultural Perspective

It has been widely realized that studying translation from a linguistic level is far from satisfactory and cultural context should never be ignored. It is meaningful and necessary for us to study translation in a cultural perspective, which helps us discover a new level in contemporary translation studies and challenges the traditional attitude toward translation.Literary translation exerts great influence on the target culture, and at the same time, the target culture has never stopped restraining the process of literary translation Socio-cultural factors of the target culture always dictate the process of literary translation. Therefore literary translation is no longer understood as mere transferences of words and expressions, but as a cultural activity within the whole socio-cultural context.In this paper, the author takes literary translation in modern China as an example, and puts the issue in cultural perspectives and takes socio-cultural factors of the Chinese culture into account to analyze and diseuss how these socio-cultural factors of modern China influence and constrain the whole translation activity in literary translation. The author deals mainly with how the contemporary socio-cultural context and the cultural factors in the target culture, namely, the political situation, social norms, literary norms of the time in China determined the selection of texts and the translator's translation strategies.Five chapters are included in this paper. Chapter One serves as introduction, and explains the purpose of this paper with an overall view of what is to be studied. The author presents some translation phenomena that can't be well explained from thelinguistics-based translation theories and points out the significance of studying translation in cultural perspectives. Chapter Two briefly reviews the development of translation theory and some changes of viewpoints due to the recognition of cultural intervention in translation. The ideas on the nature of translation have been greatly changed. The meaning of the source text is no longer the whole focus and the function of the target text is gaining more and more attention. At the same time, "fidelity" and "equivalence" are no longer the focus of translation studies. Chapter Three explores cultural constraints on literary translation. First, the author analyzes the relationship between culture and literary translation and then illustrates how the target cultural factors constrain literary translation. Chapter Four is the main body of this paper. Three parts are included in this chapter. Part one presents the socio-cultural backgrounds of literary translation boom in modern China; part two is devoted to a detailed analysis of how the socio-cultural context of modern China constrains the choice of original texts from two aspects: social needs and literary norms; part three focuses on how the socio-cultural context restrains the selection of the translator's translation strategies. This part interprets why domestication and such translation techniques as addition, deletion and shift are widely adopted by most translators of the period. In Chapter Five concludes this dissertation with a summary and suggestions for future study of the issues proposed in this paper.