A Critique Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Kite Runner:an Acculturation Perspective

Acculturation, a phenomenon of cultural interaction, has the potential of being applied to translation studies. When people with different cultural backgrounds come into contact, cultural changes will take place in both of the original cultural patterns after a certain period of time, and that process of cultural changes and the changes resulting from that process fall into the field of acculturation. However, the fact that the process of acculturation is often affected by various factors, such as the power relationship, different ideology and cultural policies, different cultural attitudes towards cultural interaction, etc. results in unbalanced acculturation. Similar things take place in the process of translation. Translation, especially literary translation, is now widely viewed as a communication across cultures, in which great importance is attached to cultural phenomena, and social-cultural factors play an increasingly important part; therefore, from the perspective of intercultural communication, translation can be regarded as a process and a result of acculturation.The present study intends to, by referring to the available research achievements of acculturation, open up a new path towards translation. It first probes into the similarities between acculturation and translation and then elaborates the relationship between them: translation is a tool of and an approach to acculturation from the macroscopic perspective, and a result and a process of acculturation from the microscopic perspective. Then it attempts to expound from an acculturation perspective the process of translation at three stages:initial acculturation stage, operational acculturation stage and evaluating acculturation stage.The study is supported by the examples cited from two Chinese versions of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. This thesis generalizes, through descriptive method, the translation procedures adopted by both translators, and concludes, from example comparison and analyses, that a translator’s respect for both original and target cultures contributes to an equal dialogue between them in the target text. Although equal dialogue is expected to take place, the thesis also points out that it is not easy to achieve such an aim because of various constraints, such as the ideological manipulation of the target culture. Therefore, from an acculturation perspective, the target text could, based on the major premise of respecting both original and target cultures, adopt various methods to achieve communication, making an integrated text of the target text which introduces the original culture and conforms to the target culture meanwhile.