Cultural Integration In Literary Translation

Language is an integral part of culture and the carrier of cultural factors as well. Literary translating, as a means of interlingual communication, is not only a course of language transfer, but also that of cultural transplanting. It concerns two cultures more than two languages, since culture provides abundant material for language to flourish on, and meanwhile, serves as the object for language to reflect.Literary translation claims great responsibility for the introduction of the source culture. There may exist sharp differences in different cultures, which share some universality, but in the meantime, carry with them particularity and peculiarity with strong national characteristics The translator will feel obliged to choose either the author-based literal translation method to reproduce the unique style of the original novel, or the reader-based free translation approach to convey the spirit of the source text.The ideal state of translation should be absolutely equivalent transfer. Although we can't completely deny the existence of equivalent transfer, from the perspective of text analysis, absolutely equivalent transfer is only a dream that can hardly be realized. The participant of translating work or the main body of translation, the translator, whether he agrees or not, always acts as a re-creator. There exist abundant cultural problems in translating practice, but thanks to all these existing questions, we have got"faithfulness, smoothness and elegance"; we have got"literal translation"and"free translation"; we have got"formal resemblance"and"spiritual resemblance"; we have got"alienation"and"domestication"; we have got"functional equivalence"; we have got multi-version study; we have got re-translation phenomena, and we have got breakthroughs and achievements. Based on the study of the two representative English versions of A Dream of Red Mansions, this thesis puts forward a tentative perspective of cultural integration for literary translation, which mainly applies the author-based literal translation method and supplements with the reader-based free translation approach, on one hand to reproduce the integral spirit of the source text and convey a unique foreign flavor, on the other hand, to supplement with fluent, accurate, idiomatic expressions of the target language to enhance the readability and acceptability of the original, and thus to achieve perfect integration of cultural introduction and literary translation in one single translated version.