2. Literature Review 

Culture has a distinctive national characteristic. It is created by the different nationalities in a particular history, geography, religion, and customs and so on. Culture is the soil of survival and development of language and language can not be separated from culture. The fundamental task of language translation is to spread and communicate culture. 

The English word culture comes from Latin cultura. It means “farming”, “culture”. The definition of culture is as many as 160 species. The most famous authoritative is the cultural anthropologist Taylor who defined culture as: Cultural is a complex body, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and the acquisition of the remaining capacity of the community and habits. American translation theorist Eugene Nida defined the cultural factors in language into five categories: (1)Ecology;(2) Material Culture ;(3)Social Culture;(4)Religious Culture; (5)Linguistic Culture.(Shao Zhihong 2005:273)

English has a long history. It also has a large number of idioms. They are implicit humor, or serious, or elegant, and vivid. As the differences from the geography, history, religion, life, customs in English and Chinese idioms, their cultural traditions are closely linked, carrying their respective national cultural characteristics and cultural information. As the English and Chinese cultural differences, the same face value and the image of the meaning of the language or the article may have different connotations. Connotations is the implied meaning which the speaker or author wants to express. So during the study the translation of Chinese folk wisecracks, the cultural factors in these two different languages are often difficult in translation. 

2.1 Translation theory

 “Literal translation” and “liberal translation”, the two kinds of translation methods express their special characteristics, relations and differences in real practice, the language circumstance we used and the mistake area appears frequently. Moreover, this text refers how to use the two different translation methods to convey the two author’s original ideas of Chinese folk wisecracks accurately. Because of the different languages have their own special characteristics and form; there are the homogeneity and differences in the vocabulary, the phrase, the method of habit and expression, etc. So we should act it according to actual circumstances, handle it nimbly at the time of translation. Generally speaking, in the concrete translation activity, translate literally, if possible, or, appeal to liberal translation. In the particular context, translators can choose the better one between through a comparison; even adopt the method that is to combine “literal translation” with “liberal translation”.    

  Literal translation is the direct transfer of a source language text (SLT) into a grammatically and idiomatically appropriate target language text (TLT) (Shuttleworth & Cowie, 2004:95). According to Barkhudarov (1969:10), a literal translation can be defined in linguistic terms as a translationmade on a level lower than is sufficient to convey the content unchanged while observing TL norms”. Catford put literal translation between word-for-word translation and free translation. In China, translators and scholars also have various interpretations of this translation approach. As an advocator of literal translation, Lu Xun defined it as: Literal translation means faithfulness and expressiveness. It must contain two aspects: 1) being easy to understand 2) retaining the manner of the SLT (Zhang Jin & Zhang Ning, 2005:232). Xu Chongxin explained literal translation from the perspective of sentence structure. He regarded sentences as the basic units. Professor Liu Zhongde defines literal translation in a relatively complete way: “In the process of translation, literal translation treats sentences as basic units and meanwhile takes the whole passage into consideration; a translator who attaches great importance to literal translation does his or her best to reproduce the ideas and writing style of the original work, retaining in the version as many rhetorical devices and sentence structures of the original as possible” (Tan Weiguo, 2005:15).