1.1 Research Background

Despite the novel is successfully introduced into English-speaking countries, little has been written in English about translation of religious culture in previous studies, not to mention Buddhism or Taoism. Besides, previous studies mainly focus on a general review of cultural images translations but lack of religious culture research. Therefore, instead of being restricted to linguistic analysis, this paper attempts to study the translation of religious culture and argues that cultural elements inevitably get lost or distorted in the process of translation.

1.2 Research Question

The overall aim of my research is to manifest the hypothesis that religious culture inevitably get lost or distorted in the process of translation from source language to target language. In this paper, I would focus on the novel Rice which was translated by Howard Goldblatt, and analyze the translator’s philosophy of translation.

1.3 Significance of the Research

    This paper assumes that religious culture inevitably gets lost or distorted in the process of translation between the two languages with different cultural backgrounds. I will use the novel Rice as a case to study the translations from Chinese into English by American translator Howard Goldblatt. Theoretically, the study might shed light on cross-culture translation under the guidance of Medio-Translatology. Further researchers might gain some insight and pay more attention to the translation of cultural elements. Empirically, there is no denying that analysis of the strategies adopted by Howard Goldblatt provides us a guidance for translating those culturally-loaded words. Nevertheless, it would be better if translator uses footnotes to fully explain the religious culture in details, which is definitely helpful to the understanding of foreign readers.