Toward Cultural Filter In Translation

Language and culture are extensively interrelated. Language, embedded in a specific cultural frame, reflects the collective experiences of the language community and the community's social values in their surroundings. While culture, on the other hand, are derived from the collective experience of the language community and considered as the interpretive frame for the cognitive and conceptual perception. Idiom, as a pithy form of linguistic products and a reflection of cultural heritage, thus cannot be adequately studied in isolation from its social and cultural context. Culture provides us with interpretive frames for making sense of our environment and experience. Thus, the translating of idioms involves for the large part the rendition of cultural reference through proper perception of cultural aspects. The translator's job is to address both the linguistic and the cultural issues of how to treat the cultural aspects implicit in a source text and of finding the most appropriate technique of conveying these aspects into the target language context.Through a comparative study on the translated versions of idiomatic expressions in the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng, this paper attempts to explore the role of culture in linguistic discourse and investigate how linguistic properties reflect cultural orientations and how cultural perspectives implicit in the linguistic system possess explicit pragmatic function as can be established on equal terms by target language community. The concept of"cultural filter"is introduced to capture the socio-cultural differences in shared conventions of behavior and communication, preferred rhetorical styles and expectation norms in the two speech communities. By resorting to a combination of translation perspectives, textual and contextual situation, cultural competence and identity, social semiotics and sign system, as filter for cultural parameters, this paper is a concrete effort to incorporate prevalent translation practices with cultural-semiotic theory in approaching strategies for translating idioms.