To become a successful translator, it seems that a double cultural person's ability is more important than that of a bilingual person, for words only possess meaning when culture functions (Nida, 1993:56).
In a word, every nation or every verbal community has formed their unique culture owing to the persity in geography, race, history, religious belief and many other aspects, so the cultural background must be integrated into the text when translating.文献综述
This paper has comprehensive studies on context of culture from three aspects. The first is the definition of cultural context; econd is the cultural context in the process of translation of the specific importance; and last are the pragmatic methods to deal with context of culture when translating.
2. Literature Review
On the translation of the cultural context, from the perspective of English and Chinese, there are a lot of books and papers.In the West and China, scholars have made a lot of research and Analysis on the importance of cultural context in translation process. Eugene A. Nida lays great emphasis on the influence of context of culture in his translation book “language and culture--context in translation”. To him, translation is an activity across cultures. Translation is not only a transformation of language, but also a more culture from the source text to the target text.
It was B. Malinowski, a celebrated anthropologist of Poland, who first proposed the concept of cultural context. Then, other scholars, such as Huang Guowen and Hu Zhuanglin, have given their own definition.
On the importance of context of culture in the process of translation, there also put forward many reflection and illustrations of it. Their classifications on the concrete importance are quite different and this paper, also, propose its own classification on its importance.
In addition, there are also a great number of methods proposed by the researchers on this aspect. What worth mentioning here is the 5 pragmatic methods put forward by Li Yunxing.
2.1 The concept of context of culture
The concept of context of culture was proposed first by B. Malinowski, a celebrated anthropologist of Poland. As he stated, context of culture refers to the specific social customs in a verbal community, including politics, history, philosophy, folk customs and many other types of ideological cultural awareness at that time as well as the contemporary writers and works.
Respecting the concept of context of culture, there are also many definitions proposed by scholars in China. According to Huang Guowen, every verbal community has its own history, culture, customs, social restrictions, thinking ways, moral sense and value preference. These specific ways to reflect the uniqueness of a certain verbal community is context of culture. On its concept, Hu Zhuanglin also put forward his own definition. Context of culture is the product of social construction and the environment of the verbal system as a whole. The concrete context under certain situation comes only from cultural context.
From the above authoritative explanations on the concept of context of culture, a much simpler definition we can sum up from their common points and shared focus on the features of it, i.e. context of culture is the specific context under the backgrounds of specific time and culture.
To some extent, translation is a process in which the translators convey one culture into another.
3. The Importance of Context of Culture in Translation
Translation means communicating, this process depends on the person's sense of hearing or reading. From the comparison of the corresponding lexical meaning, grammatical class and rhetorical skill, the validity of the translation can not be judged. It is important that, to some extent, the receptors correctly understand and appreciate the translated texts. Therefore, it is essential that functional equivalence is in the understanding of the original receptors and appreciation of the text, in comparison with this way to illustrate the translation text understanding and appreciation of the translated text. As stated above, translation is to some extent a process in which the translators convey one culture into another (Nida, 1993:123).