The “resistant Translation” Studies Of The English Version Call To Arms From The Perspective Of Cultural Translation

Traditional translation studies focus on the micro level of language, which regards translation as a conversion between two languages, paying attention to the intratextual contrast and analysis. Since the 1970 s, the rising of the school of cultural translation in the west has greatly changed people’s understanding of traditional translation theory. The putting forward of the term “cultural turn” makes the scholars realize that translation is not only a kind of intralingual communication behavior, but also a kind of cross-cultural communication behavior, thus the study of translation extends to the macro level, covering the social aspect,political aspect, ideological aspect and so on. Due to the big differences in language system,ways of thinking, social customs, religious beliefs, etc. between the East and the West, how to transfer the “foreignness” in one’s own culture to the foreign readers increasingly becomes a problem for translation theorists and practitioners urgently to be solved. In such an academic background, the Italian American scholar Lawrence Venuti, based on the theoretical foundation of deconstruction and post-colonialism, proposes the theory of “resistant translation”.Venuti criticizes the “invisibility” of translators and “transparency” in the translation practice, namely there are no traces of translation in the rendered version, the smooth translation is actually the result of the British and American cultural hegemony. He believes that there are differences in rights between the strong culture and the weak culture, and he advocates the heterogeneous elements in culture should be retained in translation, so as to resist the dominance of target language and disintegrate the ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism. The proposition of “resistant translation” is aiming at respecting and protecting the differences in foreign culture.Based on the short stories Na Han which are profound in cultural implication, the author of this thesis chooses the most representative English version, namely the one rendered by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and analyzes the cultural aspects in the translation. The author classifies the Chinese culture into five different categories and then discusses the rationality and feasibility of “resistant translation” in translating these cultural elements. Through analyzing the sentences with Chinese cultural characteristics in the English version, the authorsummarizes the issue in this paper— how do the translators uttermostly reserve the original flavor and disseminate the Chinese culture, with the expectation of providing reference for other literature translation.