On Cultural Transmission In Fortress Besieged From Functional Translation Theory

Nowadays, the words 'culture' and 'translation' are being increasingly linked. As translation involves two different languages that are the carriers of their respective cultures, it is not only a transfer between languages but also a communication between cultures. However, through long historical development, each ethnic group has deposited its unique features of culture because of the special living surroundings, religious beliefs, traditional customs, ways of life, value systems, conception of beauty, etc. Therefore, there exist more or less differences between different cultures. These cultural differences undoubtedly become obstacles in the translation process. How to overcome the cultural obstacles in the translation becomes an urgent issue for translators.The huge cultural gap between Chinese culture and Western culture makes the translation between English and Chinese extremely difficult. Owing to historical and economic reasons, the Westerners seldom know the Chinese culture. This poses great difficulties for Chinese books to be translated into English, especially those books with rich Chinese cultural elements. Therefore, how to overcome the obstacles of cultural element in C-E (Chinese-English) translation becomes a big problem.The author of this paper selects the Chinese novel Weicheng and its English translation Fortress Besieged as the research data to explore how to overcome the cultural obstacles in C-E translation.Weicheng is a novel written by Qian Zhongshu, who is considered as a Chinese scholar-novelist. It has been acclaimed as "one of modern China's two best novels," or her "greatest novel. Throughout the Chinese novel, references are made to Chinese and Western literature, philosophy, logic, customs, laws, educational systems and other areas such as foreign languages and feminism. It covers various aspects of culture. It is one feature of the novel, but is hard to deal with in the translation process because of the huge differences between Chinese culture and Western culture. Therefore, it is ofgreat significance to study how these obstacles are overcome in the English translation Fortress Besieged so that it would give some enlightenment and guidance on how to deal with similar problems.In the research process, the guiding theory is the culture-oriented German functional translation theory. The representative persons of this school are Holz-Mantari, Reiss and Vermeer, Nord, etc. They consider translation as communicative action and they think the focus of translation study is cultural transmission instead of linguistic transformation. The purpose of the target text (skopos) is the highest rule of translation.In contrast to older approaches to translation, which are source-text oriented and prescriptive, this method is translation-oriented, and relies on description and explanation of the purpose of translation. Important questions during the translation include what the function of the target text is, and thus, how exotic or familiar the target text should be made for the intended readership.According to Nida's classification of culture, the author of the thesis analyses the translation of cultural element from five categories: ecological culture, material culture, social culture, religious culture and linguistic culture. Through analyzing the typical sentences in the source text and in the target text, various translating techniques are summarized so that it would give some enlightenment and guidance on the translation theory and practice.Generally speaking, in translating activities we are more often than not concerned with two most commonly adopted approaches — alienation and adaptation. The former is usually termed as source culture (SC) oriented and the latter, target culture (TC) oriented.The conclusion of the analysis is that in every sub-category both the approach of adaptation and the approach of alienation are adopted in the translation. The approach of alienation is source-culture oriented;it is helpful to introduce the source culture to the target readers and its adoption means respect the original author and the source culture. However, sometimes the result of alienation may make the target readers puzzled and boring. So theapproach of adaptation is also necessary in cross-cultural translation. Adaptation can make the readers easily understand the meaning of the work.According to the Skopostheorie, "The end justifies the means". The translator's translation approach is determined by the purpose of the target text. The purpose of the target text (the English translation Fortress Besieged) is to "generate even greater interest in Qian Zhongshu and his works" in the English readers (cit. Translators' preface), which means that the translators of the novel should not only be loyal to the original author, but also have to take the acceptability of the target readers into account. The English translation Fortress Besieged is actually a compromised product of the translators between the original author and the English target readers, in a sense, also between Chinese culture and Western culture.In this sense, the role of translator could be that of cultural mediator. The translator mediates between the target readers and the original author;between the source culture and the target culture according to the purpose of the target text. Therefore, a good translator should not only master the source language and the target language very well, but also need to know the two cultures very well. Besides, he should also have the ability to use various methods to mediating between the two cultures according to the purpose of the target text.