Chinese And British Cultural Differences And Translation Strategy

As English belongs to the Anglo-Saxon language family and Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, there are far more differences between the two languages as well as the cultures in which the languages exist and develop than that between the languages in the same language family. Owing to differences in living environment, geographical conditions, social customs, religious beliefs, historical and literary allusions and modes of thinking and so on between China and Britain, the cultural information carried by various factors show these differences.Translating is a complex and fascinating task, as I. A. Richards (1953) once claimed that translating is probably the most complex type of event in the history of the cosmos. In the development of modern translation theories, there is a tendency that culture is introduced into this field. Translating becomes more complex for it has been defined as a cross-cultural communication event, and it involves not only two languages but also two cultures. In order to generate a better translation between Chinese and English texts, the translator should not only master the two languages but also have a good command of the two cultures.As for the relation between culture and translation, the study can be done from two perspectives: macro point of view and micro point of view. This thesis attempts to probe into the translation of cultural differences from a microscopic view. It tries to seek for appropriate approach to cultural factors translation and identify the translation strategy.The thesis consists of five chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction briefly reviews the new orientation in translation studies. That is the recent theoretic trend of "cultural turn". Chapter one mainly discusses the defining, modeling and categorizing of culture and cultural differences between Chinese and British languages. Chapter two discusses about the definition, model, theory and strategy of translation. Chapter three tries to find a medium between Chinese and British cultures through categorizing cultures into ecology, material culture, social culture, organization, and gestures and habits and translation as a cross-cultural event. It also talks about dimension and perspective. Chapter four puts forward some practical techniques in translating cultural factors between Chinese and British languages. There are four concrete strategies to deal with different kinds of cultural factors: transliteration/literal translation with cultural explanation, free translation, loan translation, and faithful translation. It is the translator's responsibility to choose proper strategy in dealing with a certain cultural factor to avoid misinterpretation and therefore mislead the target reader. Chapter five aims at strengthening the awareness of the importance of cultural teaching in translation training among college students by introducing the contents of a translation syllabus and meanwhile puts forward some corresponding suggestions for improving college students' cultural competence under the purpose of improving their translation competence.In conclusion, it is reiterated that inter-lingual translation involves not only making the original culture intelligible to the target reader, but also propagating the source culture to the target culture. Therefore, when a translator translates cultural factors, he/she should pay much attention to the original cultural connotations, and try to choose a proper translation strategy to overcome the untranslatability caused by the incomparability between two cultures, in order that his/her versions could really become a medium in disseminating culture.