| anthropologist: n. 人类学家 |
| ethics: n. 道德规范 |
| cultural diversity: 文化的多样性 |
| decoding: n. 解码，译码 |
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文化与翻译--Part I 课文学习--第二页
（ Culture and Translation ） |
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| II. Relationship Between Culture And Translation To tackle the relationship between culture and translation, we should first clarify what is culture. The anthropologist E. B. Tyler has claimed that culture is a complex of knowledge, belief, ethics, laws, arts, customs, and other social abilities and conventions. As the accumulation of human social activities and experiences, culture is not abstract at all. We can perceive that it does exist. We create and renew cultures with our own emotions, skills, wisdoms, etc. In the sense, cultures, on the one hand shared common features because that to some extent, different as peoples are, they have some abilities in common; and on the other hand, diverse in contents and forms due to the fact that different nations and nationalities perform different social activities and hold various values, which can be taken as the origins of cultural diversity. Since translation is regarded as a sort of cross-cultural communication through different languages and languages of any specific community resulted from its culture accumulation, messages are transmitted by means of combining linguistic symbols and non-linguistic symbols, that is, by linguistic form of the language and the cultural content together. Therefore, only by an organic combination of these two aspects can a message be transmitted precisely. But when we try to convey a certain cultural concept through another language, something unique in the original one must be lost. For example, "7" is a luck number in Western countries while in China it has nothing to do with such kind of symbolic meaning. We use "8" to symbolize the notion of luckiness in Chinese of which Western people think not special at all. Besides, sometimes, contrary cultural connotations may be embodied in the same entities in different cultures. For instances, Chinese people regard "6" as a good number which indicates that everything goes on smoothly without any obstacles while Western people use this number to symbolize "devils" or "evil things'. They have quite different feelings toward "6" from us Chinese people. Such kind of connotations can not be easily decoded unless the translator has a profound knowledge of the English culture. From this point of view, we may say that the task of a translator should contain decoding of the source language as well as its cultural connotations. If not so, his/her translation will not convey the message exactly. The following examples will give us a clear evidence for this claim. Origin: many Canadians have never read a newspaper though some newspapers are free, because they do not know their ABC. Target ：尽管有些报纸免费，许多加拿大人从不看报，因为他们不懂自己的 ABC 。 Although this version of translation did accomplish the task of changing one language into another ， it didn't transmit the message successfully. The phrase “ABC” placed obstacles for Chinese readers ． Not all of them can understand what it exactly means and further explanations are needed here, i ． e ． translators should make it clearer ． Actually, in English “ABC” is often used to represent the simplest and most basic facts about a subject ， and this is the cultural connotation of “ABC” ． That means that we should put the translation in such a way ： Target ：尽管有些报纸免费供应，许多加拿大人从不看报，因为他们目不识丁。 Here we have another example ． It's a sentence in one of the writings of Edgar Snow ． The English sentence “The streets were completely deserted ， and everything stood in crumbling ruins.” was first translated as ： 街道已完全荒废，一切都在倾颓中。 Then in a 1979 version of the same text the sentence is rendered as ： 街上阒无人迹，到处都是断垣残壁。 It's clear that the earlier translator was evidently trying to match formally the target language text with the original text in order to produce a translation that would look like the original ． He did not take fully into consideration the ways in which intended readers might respond to such connotations ， ( i ． e ． he didn't pay any attention to the cultural connotations of both languages) ， and as a result his rendering appears both fuzzy and strange ． In fact ， the Chinese term renders “deserted” usually refers to the laying waste of land or negligence of human activities which is usually of longer duration rather than to the emptiness of streets. The rendering of the English term “in” is likewise unnatural ， and for “crumbling ruins” the Chinese text means “slanting decay” ． So we can see that the latter version is more precise in that it conveys the cultural connotation much better ． Translation should take into consideration the cultural aspects ． |
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