Cultural Turn In Translation Study: Cultural Interpretation Of Translation Text

Translation is the centuries-old cultural and communicative activity. While it can never depart from transference of the language, translation is not only the simple transference, for the language reflects the culture and meanwhile is restricted by the culture. Therefore, to be successful in transferring, two things are necessary---mastering the language and being familiar with the culture represented both the two languages. Translation studies is as-a-matter-of-fact the cultural reciprocal study. Since the publication of Translation, History, and Culture written by Sussan Bassnett and AndréLefevere in 1990, they first formally put forward that translation studies take "cultural turn", which marked a shift of emphasis. The thesis firstly devotes to the study of the relationship between culture and translation. And then it makes a review of the cultural turn in translation studies both in the West and at home, stressing the universality and profound significance on this research. Next, the thesis put forward that, under the background of cultural turn, the cultural interpretation of the translation text, which probes that the cultural factors represented in the language can deeply affect the quality of the translation text. The implication of these discussions is that, only with the concrete analysis and comparison of these cultural factors, a successful language transference can be achieved in the cultural interpretation of translation text and the misinterpretation would be avoided. In the end, the thesis probes into different strategies of the cultural interpretation in detail. According to Newmark's two famous translation strategies---semantic translation and communicative translation, six strategies of the cultural interpretation are adopted here: conveying the connotation meaning merely; making addition within the text; leaving out the redundancy; making appropriate evaluation; making additional footnote; and substituting with a similar expression. To sum up, in the study of cultural turn, translation process is closely related to the cultural interpretation. And as long as those strategies are adopted by different translator within different social cultures and as long as a translator can apply them in definite concrete text, the textual interpretation can be achieved into a better version.