Cultural Clashes In English-Chinese Translation

Cultural factors involved in translation have aroused more and more attention. Translation obviously is not a simple two-way street between two languages. Rather, it is an activity involving the transfer of different cultures from one language to another. The most important task of translation is to convey the original meaning of the source text faithfully and smoothly. And one of the main difficulties in translation comes from the fact that translation can't always find easy correspondence in language units between the source language and the target language, because of the existence of cultural differences. Therefore, how to deal with the problem of cultural clashes is an important and significant task in translation.This thesis focuses on cultural clashes and consists of four chapters. Firstly, an introduction to language, culture, translation is given in Chapter One. The definition of culture and the interrelation between language and culture, translation and culture are analyzed in detail. Secondly, the cultural clashes translators may encounter in translation are discussed in Chapter Two in four perspectives: lexical level, syntactical level, discourse, proverbs and idioms. And then the causes and background of cultural clashes are analyzed in Chapter Three in terms of historical culture, religious culture, geographical and regional...