跨文化交际视角下汉语文化专有词的翻译方法(3)
As the more and more frequent communication between China and the other countries, especially western world, it is important to promote Chinese culture to expand Chinese influence and let the world knows more about China. Chinese culture-specific words play a vital role in Chinese culture, so they need to be translated properly in cross cultural perspective.
2.1 Cultural vacancy and translation barrier
Due to large differences in region, religion, tradition and cultural image between English and Chinese culture, it seems difficult to achieve complete equivalence in terms of the translation of Chinese culture-specific words, which called cultural vacancy. As a result, many translation barriers do exist in the translation in this area.
2.2 Cultural disposition
First of all, different objective things represent the same cultural images. To refer a same cultural image, China and the western countries prefer to use different objective things. The disacquaintance of Chinese and western cultures definitely leads to cultural disposition in cross-cultural translation. For example, in China, rats are often used to describe someone who is timid. However, pigeon or chicken will be the westerner’s choice. Chinese people prefer to use cattle to refer to hard work and power. On the other hand, westerners create many expressions of horse to convey the same meanings. All of these show that cultural images contributes a lot in cultural disposition in cross-cultural communication.
Second, same objective things are expressed in different cultural images. Due to the differences in historical development, ideology, religion, same objective things may refer to different cultural images.
Chinese use 银河，on the other hand, westerners adopt milk way to stand for the same objective things.
Thirdly, same objective things represent the opposite cultural images. The translation related to cross culture will easily leads to cultural disposition that the same objective things represent the cultural images. Influenced by different ethnic value and way of thinking, the same objective things may convey the opposite cultural images. Take cricket for example. In Chinese culture, cricket is the symbol of sadness which was used a lot in ancient Chinese poem. On the contrary, it stands for comfort and quietness in western culture. Magpie, for Chinese people, is a sign for auspiciousness. However, in Scotland, it represents the death and evilness. John Clare wrote that Magpie that chatted, no omen so black. In different cultures, same images may represent total opposite meanings which make translation even harder.
Fourthly, cultural disposition in macroscopic aspect. Compared with microcosmic culture, macroscopic culture tends to focus on the broad culture of the historical development of the whole nation which contains the material as well as spiritual cultures and the basic color of humanities of the national culture. During the cross-cultural communication, not only the microcosmic culture should be paid attention to, but also the macroscopic culture in an attempt to grasp the cultural patterns and avoid the translations deviating from the culture of the target language which hamper the efficiency of communication. For example, Chinese people think highly of collectivism but westerners manifest inpidualism. Additionally, in Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairytales, people from different cultural backgrounds have different views towards the death of the little girl who sells the match. In western people’s eyes, the tough spirit of the girl helps her to rebirth and to have a brand new life. By contrast, what Chinese people’s feeling of the story is the sadness of the girl and feel sorry to the fate of her poor life.
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