Frontiers in Language Teaching and Research (FLTR) Volume 2, 2015 Doi: 10.14355/fltr.2015.02.001
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Translation and Foreign Culture Exchange Taiyong Chen College of History, Wuhan University, Wuhan, P.R.China sunbelt777@sina.com Abstract As the main method of foreign culture exchange, the art of translation is very important. Its importance is becoming even more outstanding since cultural exchange is being emphasized and carried out more often nowadays. Translation activities under foreign culture exchange are being restricted by many complicated factors and thus, the biggest obstacles should first be solved. These obstacles include the problem of foreign culture crossover and the impossibility to translate between different cultural levels. “Translating culture” is definitely not just about simple translation between languages or words. It is an activity that takes sociology and cultural studies into account. It combines an internal and external understanding between the specific cultural exchange and dialogue. It demands understanding and explanatory skills of the foreign culture from the translator. As an important mean to the understanding and explanation of foreign cultures, adaptation and alienation are gradually developing their different vital roles in the topic of foreign culture exchange. Keywords Translation; Foreign Culture Exchange; Adaptation; Alienation
Introduction In Western countries, linguistics is being regarded as an advanced discipline. It is because linguistics has been adapted as a vital part in the development and motivation of a society. Linguistics helps to solve many problems in various areas such as language education, language rules, social languages, daily languages (slangs), psychological language (body language), and computer languages. This is the result of the harmonious integration between language developmental law and society developmental law. Of course, foreign cultural exchange and integration cannot be avoided in the process of human society development. Migration of populations, interracial marriage, and international exchange activities are all reasons that makes translation of languages an irreplaceable element and skill. Its social function has been shown to be important especially in this age of advanced knowledge and global exchange culture. In fact, “translation is the rendering of “this language” into “that language”, a form of language grafting and replacement, an action that possess social and cultural qualities, an exchange and dialogue between foreign cultures internally and externally, and is the translator’s understanding and explanation of the foreign culture.”(Wang Xiuwen, 2006) Translation Theory and Standards Translation is an ancient and important cultural activity which tightly linked with cultural exchange and communication of ideas. In a narrow sense, translation is the process of replacing words in a foreign language in one’s mother language. In a general sense, translation is to transform passages of message in one language into another language in an accurate and sensible way. A process of transforming a foreign representation/concept into one’s familiar way of representation. The art of translation has begun in China 1700 years ago for the Buddha scriptures. European’s translations also have a few hundred years’ history. In the long history of humanity societies, the sages who possessed profound insights have already summarized, their experience about translation’s characters into many detailed theories and standards. Tang Dynasty’s great translator Master Xuan-Zang suggested the theory of “Xin”; “Needs to be true to the original work, but also understandable for the audience” and “5 things not to translate”. Master Lu-Xun also suggested that “Whenever one translates, one must consider both two sides. Of course one would be to aim for easy understanding, and the other would be to keep the original work’s charm and style”. (Lu Xun, 1940) Buo-Rei compared transition with making friends; only people with similar minds can become best friends. “If the
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Frontiers in Language Teaching and Research (FLTR) Volume 2, 2015
translator doesn’t have similar temperament/quality with the poet, that translator could not possibility translate that poet’s artwork.” Buo-Rei kept “Writings last thousand years. You know what happens when you make a mistake” as his motto and work in the literature translation industry with an extremely serious attitude. He believed that good translation must undergo many times of editions. There will never be a time where one can be satisfied with the translation even after much hard work and that there will never be perfect work. From this we can see how hard the work of translation is. Only one word being produced after three years of consideration! Although the process of translation is extremely difficult, it contributes tremendously and is crucial to the history of humanity, technology development, and more. And by what standard and measurements do we use during the translation process to judge its authenticity? This question itself is already a highly controversial topic. Translation’s standard and measurements has always been different to different people. Different translators each have their own style and sets of standards. To judge the level of a piece of translated work, different readers have different opinions and preferences. Mr. Yian-Fu’s “Faithfulness, expressiveness, elegance” standard combines the essence of Han, Tang Dynasty’s translation theories into its own unique set of theory and contributed greatly in the modern translation history. However, even such great theory has its own shortcomings as a translation standard, especially with the modern society’s advancement, language development, and flourish of the industry of translation, even the “Faithfulness, expressiveness, elegance” theory itself has been translated and interpreted in a brand new way. The interpretations nowadays have already exceeded the original theory’s depth and scope. Some can already be defined as new theories that has been developed based the “Faithfulness, expressiveness, elegance” standards. We can conclude the “New Faithfulness, expressiveness, elegance” theory has follow: Faithfulness: To follow the original work’s content. Content generally means the phenomenon, event, things, and reasoning/principle described in the original work and the emotion and standpoint used while describing those mentioned above. Expressiveness: To translate in a grammatically correct and clear fashion so that readers can easily understand the content. The translation is not translated word from word, but has been restructured to be something that make sense. Elegance: To match/keep the original work’s writing style so that audience can experience the cultural colour, ethnic, period, area, linguistic characteristic, and writing style to the maximum. Avoid replacing the original author’s writing style with the translator’s own. Translation and Foreign Culture’S Interpretation The nature of translation is "a cross-cultural communication which uses symbol as a mean to accomplish the goal of regenerating the meaning." (Xu Jun, 2003) The definition Mr. Xu Jun has provided gives a high-level summarization of the nature of translation. It is obvious that the two essential features of translation are the linguistic differences and cultural differences, that is what we usually refer as cross-language and cross-cultural character. It’s essential purpose is to execute cross-cultural communication through linguistic symbols and transformation of meanings. "Translation plays the role of middleperson between different cultures and mediates for different cultural exchange activities. Translation is exactly what we often call the 'bridge'." (Xu Jun, 2003) From this we can see that the image representation of translation should be a "bridge", which is the essence of the "cross" in cross-cultural exchange. Culture, as a complex social phenomenon, is a combination composed of the society’s mode of production, lifestyles, ways of thinking, expressive style of the language, social values, ethical values, and other behavioural characteristics. Culture is an action that possesses social and ethnic qualities. Every culture has its own unique style and content, and its language is an important concomitant factor that associates with the culture’s emergence and development. The society’s cultural emergence and cultural development, in turn, make its language richer and more exquisite. Culture is also an influential concept, which means different cultures can influence and inspire each other. Cross-cultural communication must rely on language as a mediator. Thus, it requires those of us who works in the field of foreign language education to emphasize on introduction and interpretation of foreign cultures during our lectures. Rather than focusing simply on the language (words) itself, we should target specifically to introduce students to that country's cultural, ethnic, interpersonal, historical, and
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other social aspect’s characteristics and knowledge. Language and culture are inseparable; the two influence and interact with each other. To fully understand the language, one must first understand the culture; to understand the culture, one must understand the language. When learning a foreign language, it is not enough to master only the pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and idioms, but also to understand the culture of the people who use that language. In this sense, foreign language education is not just the teaching of the knowledge about the language, but also to understand and grasp that country’s cultural background and knowledge. In foreign language teaching activities, teachers should gradually introduce social and cultural background of the targeted country based on the teaching materials, deliberately allow students to understand the differences between the targeted country's culture and their own country’s culture, and enhance students' awareness of cross-cultural communication. Foreign language studies and cultural studies are inseparable. Communicative ability is the main objective of foreign language studies. With "emphasis on communication" being adopted as the mainstream teaching principle nowadays, teachers should be aware of the importance of cultural studies and incorporate more of the teachings of cultural background and knowledge in their syllabus. Language is a special kind of social and cultural phenomenon; it is a convention established from long period of social life and practices of its culture. Each language is created and developed in a particular social and historical context. Therefore, each language reflects the unique social and cultural phenomenon of its country during each particular historical period. In addition, the foreign country’s cultural context also plays a very important role in the translation process. If during the foreign language translation lectures, teachers " do not pay enough attention to the foreign country’s cultural context, the ‘body’ is ignored; that is, the level of 'trans-' (as in transformation) is not enough and the needed extend of ‘-late’ (as in reiterate) cannot be reached. Naturally, the acceptable level of the translated work would be affected negatively."(Sun Yifeng, 2012) For example, many Chinese to English translation works have been done perfectly in terms of its English expression, grammar, and sentence structure, however, there are still a sense of “awkwardness” and does not have the fluency and gracefulness that presents in original English literatures. Chinese to Japanese translations would be another example. A student might have indeed translated their sentence correctly in terms of sentence structure and grammar, but in reality, native Japanese speakers will be utterly confused and the original meaning of the sentence is entirely lost. That is exactly what the slang word “Chinglish” or “Chipanese” means: “Chinese-English” and “Chinese-Japanese”. This resulted from the lack of deep understanding about the Japanese Humanities and Social culture and many other complex factors; that is exactly what we have been talking about: the Lack of profound and accurate interpretation of foreign cultures and its cultural context during cross-cultural exchange. In conclusion, if you want your translations to have the same expressiveness as the original work, then you must be able to interpret the targeted country's cultural correctly and in depth. Adaptation and Alienation in Cross-Culture Translation Tanslation can be divided into adaptation translation and alienation translation according to the translation strategy of cross-culture communication. Adaptation means “target language (TL) culture-oriented” while alienation means “source text (ST) culture-oriented”. Specifically speaking, adaptation is the translation strategy which emphasis on transparency and fluency in order to eliminate the awkwardness of the original text in the targeted language/culture. The adaptation school which promote a “target language (TL) culture-oriented” approach proposes that translation should overcome not only the linguistic obstacles but also the cultural obstacles. One responsibility of translators is to avoid cultural conflicts while at the same time, translators are also transmitters. Translators should not assume nor have high expectations on the readers for them to have the knowledge and creativity to comprehend completely the translation annotation and deduction. Each reader will have different educational background, experiences (thus feelings), and ways of thinking which guide them to land on a different conclusion. As a result, it requires the translators make it as far as possible for making the reflected world by source text closer to the world of the readers in the target language culture, so as to achieve the reciprocity between the source text culture and the target language culture. Therefore, in order to reciprocate the ST culture to the fullest, it is required of the translator to rewrite/reinterpret/reflect the ST’s world into the TL as close as possible to the world of the readers. To be more specifically, we should consider the reaction of readers as one of the assessment criteria for our translations. A translation can be said as reliable when the reactions of the TL
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readers approximately equal to the reactions of the original text’s readers. (Chen Yan, 2009) Alienation translation means retaining the foreignness of the original text to a certain extent and breaks the routine in translating to the target language. The alienation school who claim the “source text (ST) culture-oriented” propose that the main purpose of translation is the communication through cultures and the source text culture will enrich the culture of target language and its language expression’s methods. For readers, the purposes of reading the translated work also include their interest in knowing more about the foreign culture. Translators should believe that the readers are able to use their intelligence and imagination to comprehend the specific things in the foreign culture. Adaptation abides by mainstream values of the language culture of the translated language while alienation deviates from the local mainstream values. Adaptation deals with the culture differences by means of pressing and makes every effort to get the comprehending of the readers by taking the style of transparent, fluent in translation. Alienation retains the culture differences making the translation present the foreignness. Adaptation and alienation are different from each other in the aspect of language culture and different from the traditional translation methods of free and literal translation. The representative of the Adaptation school, Nida, recommends “functional equivalence” and underlined the acceptance of readers which is just the equivalence of the reactions from the readers of original text and translation. He holds the idea that adaptation is a key method in avoiding the conflicts between languages and culture effectively as well as conducting effective cross-culture communication. Nida places great emphasis on the communicative function in translation. His recommendation, functional equivalence, is defined as that the acceptance level of the readers in TL from the translation information should roughly be the same as that of the readers in ST. However, on the other hand, the representative the school of Alienation, Venuti, proposes “impedance type of translation” which develop a kind of theory and practice of translation that highlight the culture differences in original texts. In the practice of translation, everything from the choice of text and the choice of translation strategies to the editing, reading and commenting on the translation, will all be influenced and interfered by the culture and social condition in the target language. Consequently, the choice of two translation strategies, adaptation and alienation is not optional but being restricted by the elements of the text, translator, readers as well as ideology, ethics and many more. Conclusions As a matter of fact, adaptation and alienation complement and benefit mutually rather than contradict each other when both can be incorporate into the concrete translation practice for cross-culture communications. All translations are essentially products of the organic application of adaptation and alienation which is just happens to be emphasized particularly according to different translators with different characters, the type of the original literary form, the translator’s own writing style, personal preferences, and other factors.. No translation is either completely adapted or completely alienated. In other words, both adaptation and alienation have their values of existence while playing their respective different roles in the field of foreign language translation. REFERENCES
[1]. Wang Xiuwen, Chinese-Japanese language translation and cross cultural communication, World knowledge press, 2006, Page 1. [2]. Lu Xun, Undecided grass(6), And lie the station miscellaneous text two gather, Lu Xun's complete works press, 1940 (Oct.). [3]. Xu Jun, Translation theory, Hubei education press, 2003, Page 75. [4]. Xu Jun, Translation theory, Hubei education press, 2003, Page 285. [5]. Sun Yifeng, Translation and intercultural communication strategies, 2012 (1), Page 17. [6]. Chen Yan, The new Japanese-Chinese Translation Course, 2009 (June. 3), Page 7.
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Taiyong Chen Ph.D. In history of Wuhan University. Born inYunnan. Now is the doctoral candidate of grade 2013 of Japanese history of the College of History of Wuhan University. Research direction: The diplomatic history of Japan; The Japanese lexicology; The study of the JapaneseChinese translation; The study on comparison of Japanese-Chinese.
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