《追风筝的人》翻译中的文化翻译(2)
4.3 Muslim Culture 15
4.4 Afghan Folk Culture 16
Chapter Five Conclusion 19
5.1 Major Findings 19
5.2 Limitations of the Research 19
References 21
An Analysis of Cultural Translation in The Kite Runner
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Traditionally, translation lays its emphasis on language. Translators concentrate on the linguistic translation at the perspective of the word, phrase and sentence, instead of taking the significance of culture factor in the process of translation into consideration. They ignored that cultural differences, including living habits, religious belief and mode of thinking, are all reflected by language habits and thinking pattern. Cultural difference would produce ill feelings to the target language readers and cause even more serious consequences than the linguistic misunderstandings. It demands translators realize that translation is more than the action that turns from one language into another and is a cultural communication activity.
Since the movement beginning in the early 1970s among scholars called “Cultural Turn”, perse new dimensions and approaches in translation studies has sprung up. It draws a tendency to studies translation in the dimension of culture—Cultural Translation, whose representatives abroad of this school are Eugene A. Nida, André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett especially. Since 1990s, many Chinese translation theorists has taken up many studies on cultural translation theory, like Liu Miqing whose work “An Outlined Theory for Cultranslation” makes a theoretical framework of it. Cultural translation theories home and abroad helps translation studies get rid of the limitation of pure linguistic translation and brings translation studies into a brand new level.
1.2 Research Significance
In the history of translation studies, translators has employed basic units of translation from morpheme and word to sentence and discourse to achieve equivalence between languages at both of content and form. They expect to discover a scientific method to solve problems in translation in this way, whereas it cause them many thorny problems in literary translation which cannot be solved by the linguistic translation. This thesis aims to study and analyze the text of the two Chinese versions of “The Kite Runner” from the perspective of Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory, with which to provide a new perspective for the study of the translations of this novel. In addition, this paper studies how the cultural factors influence the two translators’ translation activities. The author of this paper expects to contribute to the research on Susan Bassnett’s cultural translation theory.