Cultural Intervention in English and Chinese Translation

In this paper, author defines translation as an act of communication in a cross-cultural context, main aim of which is to establish communication between members of different cultures in accordance with previously determined communicative target purpose. He then discusses unavoidable cultural intervention in process of translation. Cases in aesthetic preference, political involvement and ethical tradition are studied to prove his proposition that translation is not only linguistic transfer, but also cultural transfer, and that the more inclusive target culture is, closer translation is to source culture, more exclusive target culture is, closer translation must be to target culture. In last part of paper, he proposes strategies of translation (especially for translation between English and Chinese) with which we can tackle cultural barriers in process of translation, i.e. distortion,ignoring and coinage.