Cultural Differences And Translation Strategies

Language and culture are interactive and interdependent. Translation is far from being a purely aesthetic or linguistic act. It is closely connected with culture and a bridge of cultural exchanges. It evokes language as well as culture among different countries and nations, thus cultural differences exert great influence on translation. In the past decades, there has been a cultural shift in translation studies. Cultural study brings a broader perspective in translation studies and frees the translators of the yoke or confinement of traditional conceptions and methods of translation. This dissertation tries to illustrate how the translator chooses the translation strategies on the consideration of cultural differences.This dissertation covers five main parts: the first chapter discusses the development of the definition of language, culture and translation and explores the dialectical relationship between them. The second chapter makes a brief review of the translation theories, such as the literary approach, the linguistic approach and the communicative and semantic approach. The culture turn of translation studies and the meaning of culture turn are also discussed here. The third chapter makes a comparison between the Chinese and the western culture in terms of the different thinking patterns, religious beliefs, geographical differences and social conventions. The cultural elements in language and the differences between the Chinese and the western cultures are reflected in translation. The fourth chapter concludes translation as a cross-cultural activity. Cultural loss is inevitable and the compensation should be made in the course of cultural translation. Thus the cross-cultural consciousness and bicultural competence are the basic requirements for the translator. The fifth chapter discusses the two main strategies of cultural translation, that is, foreignization and domestication. The dissertation sets out to study the two main translation strategies on cultural translation and comes to the conclusion that foreignization and domestication are indispensable and mutually complementary with the former functioning as the primary mainly on the cultural level and the latter as the secondary mostly on the linguistic level, for the nature of translation is cultural communication. Social and political environments, the purpose of the translator, the readership and so on are decisive in the choice of the two strategies in translation. According to the analysis above, it is predictable that foreignization is an unavoidable trend in the Chinese literary translation on the purpose of disseminating the Chinese culture in future.With the increasing cultural exchange in the age of globalization, translation is shouldering the task of communicating and mutual understanding. Cultural studies will undoubtedly clear the path to the future translation study and help translation to accomplish the task of social development. In order to make people all over the world know more about China, the translators need to spare no pains to introduce China to the outside world and adopt the foreignization strategy more frequently.