Cultural Awareness and Translation Strategies in Literary Translation

With the emergence of foreign “cultural turn” in the 1980s, cultural translations have become more and more important. Translation studies are no longer limited to simple linguistic analysis and comparative analysis between source text and target text, beginning to consider broader issues related to context, history, and tradition. Scholars have paid more attention to the cultural factors in their works, put forward a series of cultural translation theories and regarded translation behavior as an intercultural communication activity. As the main body of translation, translators should not only have profound bilingual ability and bilingual cultural knowledge, but also have sensitive cultural awareness, so as to successfully convey the information and meaning of the original text. The translator’s cultural consciousness refers to the translator’s way of thinking, which is the conscious or unconscious judgment and sensitive cognition of culture. It runs through the whole translation process and restricts the translator’s choice of cultural translation strategies. The research corpus of this thesis is the English translation of Pearl S. Pearl S. Buck is a writer who devotes herself to the cultural exchange between China and the West and a translator who promotes the Water Margin to the world. This paper compares the translation of four-character, proverbs and customs in the source and target texts. Pearl S. Buck adopts different translation strategies according to different languages and culture characteristics, making the translation on the basis of the faithful original text, as far as possible in line with the reader’s expectation. It is of great practical significance to explore these cultural characteristics and their translation.