Intercultural Translation And Cultural Construction

Against the background of economic and cultural globalization,"cultural turn"which appeared in the 1990s marked the prelude to the increasing attention to the influence of culture upon translation. In the meantime, alongside with the development of Cultural Studies, the School of Cultural Translation, with Susan Bassnett taking the lead, is calling for a"translation turn"in Cultural Studies. Just as what Bassnett and Lefevere have put it: the study of translation is the study of cultural interaction (2001: ix).Although there has been significant progress in intercultural studies abroad, they fail to provide an adequate account of Chinese culture, and in China a systematic theory on cultural translation has not yet been formulated: theories like"Faithfulness, Expressiveness, Elegance","Similarity in Spirit", etc. cannot satisfy the needs of intercultural translation studies. This paper, on the basis of theories in intercultural communication, brings a new perspective: intercultural translation. This perspective focuses on how to preserve as much original flavor of the source language (SL) culture as possible, and in the meantime makes sure that the information to be conveyed is understood and accepted by target language (TL) readers. The constructivist approach to intercultural ethics makes it possible that cultures can be constructed through intercultural translation. Furthermore, Sarbaugh's taxonomy of levels of interculturalness proposes four variables, and when they are employed to measure the degree of conversion, we learn to what extent intercultural translation can be conducted.This paper takes the two English versions of the play Teahouse as a case study. Teahouse is one of Lao She's greatest works, which is regarded as the summit of his art of writing. The drama reflects nearly fifty years of historical changes in Chinese society from the late Qing dynasty to the pre-liberation period. There have been many researches into the play, mainly from such perspectives as performability, skopos theory, context theory, translatable obstructions and drama translation. However, till now there has not been a systematic study of the English versions from an intercultural perspective. Typical examples in this play are classified into several types, including the translation of Chinese-specific expressions, idioms, allusions and utterances. This paper analyzes the examples within the framework of intercultural translation approach and in the meantime tests the feasibility of this approach.