Translation And Rewriting-A Study From The Perspective Of Culture

With the proposal of "cultural turn" in translation by Bassnett& Lefevere in 1990s, the translation professionals have begun to notice that translation is never a simple linguistic act but a social, cultural and communicative act. Therefore, translation is constrained by many factors such as two cultures, two ideologies and two languages. In fact, the majority of translation challenges have something to do with the two different cultures concerned. Some ideas, concepts, definitions and cultural customs are difficult to convey due to the fact that they are part of the cultures, namely, the cultural things, not simply because they are language problems. In view of the great differences between Chinese culture and English culture, the translation needs to be rewritten to fulfill its purposes.Translation rewriting is a constrained writing, which means that the rewriting is not free production of individual writing but for the translational purpose, namely, to render the source text more acceptable to the target readers. It is never a betrayal of the source text but an exaltation of the source text. Translators should never be fettered by the source language as he has to produce something comprehensible and acceptable to the target readers. Literal translation will not do. The paper examines the necessities of translation rewriting from the three perspectives as ideology, customs and languages. Ideology determines translation in a big way; the cultural differences need cultural adaptation in idioms translation; and the target text needs to conform to the requirements of the target language. The author also investigates the usefulness of translation rewriting and some useful rewriting strategies such as Deletion and Addition to produce a preferable translation between Chinese and English.