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With the intercultural exchange and communication promoted, recent years witnesses an increase in the studies on relations of culture and translation. For years the west scholars have been studying intercultural contact, conducting researches and publishing books concerning communication across culture. Among these are: Language, Culture and Translation by Eugene A. Nida in 1993, Communication between Culture by A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter and Lisa A. Stefani, Language, Culture and Communication by Charlotte Hoffmann etc. But these works hardly involved comparison between English and Chinese or mistranslations of cultural factors.
In terms of cultural approach to the study of mistranslation, some progress has also been made in China. Luo Jinde’s On the Cultural Background of Certain Errors and Defects in Translating is a brief introduction to distinguishing technical mistranslation from that of cultural character. Ke Ping’s Cultural Presuppositions and Mistranslation is a brief commentary on the cultural presuppositions, and a brief introduction to the relationships between cultural presuppositions and translational misleading. These important essays are mainly source-oriented and focused almost exclusively on the negative facet of mistranslation for the simple reason that it causes errors and misunderstanding.
Meanwhile, for the purpose of emphasizing positive impact of the cultural mistranslation on the development of literary history in the dimension of cultural communication and interaction, some other scholars conduct a study on mistranslation from literary-oriented standpoint. For example, Wang Ning’s Toward a Translation Study in the Context of Chinese-western Culture Studies, Xie Tianzheng’s New Perspectives in Translation Studies and Bai Liping’s Misreading and Mistranslation, etc.
II. Definition of Culture
If we look back upon the historical origin of culture, we can find that the word culture was first used in Chinese ancient books. Its meaning is opposite to uncivilized, pristine and wildness, and has great differences with the meaning of culture which we use today. Nowadays, the word culture is original from the Latin word “cultus” which stems from “colerc” (tend, cultivate). In late Middle English, the sense was “cultivation of soil” and from this (early 16th century) arose the present meaning of “cultivation of the mind, faculties and manners”. The meaning of English culture is related to politics, 1aw, and education etc social life. From the end of the 19th century, the scholars around the world tried to give a definite definition to culture. However, the definitions vary a lot from each other by now.
The earliest and the most widely acknowledged definition of culture was given by the British anthropologies Edwar Tylor in his Primitive Culture. He puts forward the first important anthropological definition of culture.
Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, an, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (Tylor 1).
More specifically, concerned with language and translation, in A Textbook of Translation, Peter Newmark defines culture as “the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that use a particular language as its means of expression.”
Daniel Bates and Fred Plog propose a description “Culture is a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, customs, behaviors and artifacts that the members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning” (SamovarP & Porter 36)
As a proposer of the Skopos theory, Vermeer focuses mole on norms conventions as the main features of a culture. For him, a culture is the entire setting of and conventions, an inpidual as a member of his society must know in order to be like everybody or to be able to be different from everybody. (Norct 33)