The Intercultural Purpose Of Translators

The Scholars, written by Wu Jingzi, is one of the greatest classic novels in Chinese traditional culture. The novel aimed to depict a vivid picture of the scholars in feudal China, their lives, their study, and their characters when involved in the feudal society. So great is the novel that YANG Xian yi and Gladys Yang took efforts to introduce it to people all over the world. Their translation is really successful as it not only retains the fidelity to the original but also achieves functional equivalence, which can be almost fully reflected by the English version of those cultural terms in The Scholars.The research on the cultural terms may be carried out in various ways. As most cultural terms carry associative meaning as well as denotative meaning, which definitely pose as different influence in the process of communication, this paper attempts to undergo a contrastive analysis of cultural terms in The Scholars to interpret the intercultural purpose of the two respectable translators– the world should get to know that there is such a rich cultural heritage in China.A language is closely related to the culture behind it, and words and phrases, the basic element of a language, inevitably bear cultural characteristics. The category of cultural terms can be identified as we explore them from different perspectives, and this paper chooses to divide them into four groups: differences in geography, in habits and experiences, in religious beliefs, myths and legends, and in political systems. In each group the very meaning is carefully explored, which is aimed to help the readers to appreciate the cultural appeals.Whether literal translation and free translation, which have long been the conflict among the translation fields, or Nida's functional equivalence, or Newmark's communicative translation and semantic translation, the essential difference has always fallen into two tendencies: source-culture-oriented or target-culture-oriented, that is to say, alienation or adaptation. Nearly all translations, transferring from one language to another, transfer from one culture to another, and the choice between alienation and adaptation is optional, depending upon the purposes of the source text author, the purpose of translation, the texts, the target text readers and so on.By contrasting those groups of terms, and the different approaches applied in translation as well, this paper finds that semantic translation is acceptable if the target readers have got some idea of the background of the source culture and that communicative translation is preferred if the target readers remain ignorant of the source culture. As for the two translation approaches, communicative translation is more likely to reproduce a cultural image in the target readers'mind, achieving functional equivalence in target text. Otherwise, translators try all means to transfer the culture only to be bound to the source language and the target readers would be turned away. Yang Xian-yi and Gladys Yang, well aware of the two cultures, naturally use target language to reproduce the source language information, retaining the original culture to the maximum.The existing publication of the relative research on the English version of The Scholars shows that there has been not much research on the original book and the translation up till now. The thesis attempts to explore"the functional equivalence"in The Scholars by means of translation of cultural terms in the novel, and to explore the deep relationship of the original cultural meaning with the translating effect, wishing to contribute a little bit to this field of research.