Paper published in META (44) 1 [1999, No.1] 133-143

Cultural Presuppositions and Misreading

Ke Ping

Abstract: Of the many possible factors that may induce misreadings in translation, cultural presupposition merits the special notice of translators because it may substantially and systematically affect their interpretation of the facts and events in source texts without their knowing it. This paper is an attempt at pinpointing the relationships between cultural presuppositions and translational misreading. The writer considers some major elements in the four sub-systems of culture and examines how these elements aided in the breeding of some presuppositions that inadvertently affected the translator’s decoding of the source message.

摘要: 在引起翻译误读的诸种因素中，文化预设尤其值得引起注意，因为它能在译者茫然无觉的情况下对他们的原文读解产生系统的影响。本文试图捕捉文化预设与翻译误读之间的内在关系。作者根据文化人类学对文化构成所做的界定，从技术-经济、社会、观念和语言四个文化子系统的角度分析了文化预设对原文读解实际产生的负面影响，并据此指出：为了尽可能减少原文误读的机会，译者有必要对自己头脑中的文化预设与各种“先结构”保持充分的警醒和认识。

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited

by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

― Ruth Benedict (1959:2)

Despite its apparent undesirability, misreading constantly occurs in translations of all ages. Since translation consists basically in understanding and making others understand (“Traduire, c’est comprendre et faire comprendre”), misreading on the translator’s part would almost always result in the distortion of the source message and consequently in one form or another of failure in the communication between the source writer and the target reader.

Misreadings in translation are often caused by the presuppositions the translator harbors about the reality of the source language community. These presuppositions are usually culturally derived and deserve the special attention of the translator. In this paper I will look into the problem of how cultural presuppositions bear upon misreadings in translation.

Philosophically presupposition refers to the logically necessary condition of some state of affairs which must be satisfied if the state of affairs is to obtain, e.g. the uniformity of nature is a presupposition of the rationality of inductive reasoning; memory is a presupposition of our having a concept of the past. Kant’s ethical theory of the categorical imperative In StarDict.)] is an account of the presuppositions of a particularly rigorous form of Protestant morality (Bullock & Stallybrass eds., 1977:495).

“Cultural presupposition as understood in the present study refers to the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ideas that are culturally rooted and that are generally shared by persons, but rarely if ever described or defined, simply because they seem so basic and obvious as not to require verbal formulation. For example, truth in the Bible is presupposed to be essentially about moral behavior instead of an abstract definition of reality or being, and wisdom the ability to decide moral and human issues with justice instead of intellectual capacity to formulate philosophical questions and provide cogent systems. The symbols of light and darkness are not related in the Bible to knowledge and ignorance, but to deliverance from or slavery to evil. And to know the Lord, sin, or deliverance, is not to know about such objects or events, but to experience them (Nida, 1981:14-16).

The term culture is used in this paper in its anthropological sense. The first important anthropological definition of culture is presented by Sir Edward Tylor in primitive Cultures (1871). He defines culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (quot. in Bock, 1979:13-14). Tylor’s definition has continually been the basis of most modern anthropological conceptions of culture.

Most anthropologists agree on the following features of culture:

(1) Culture is socially acquired instead of biologically transmitted;

(2) Culture is shared among the members of a community instead of being unique to an individual;

(3) Culture is symbolic. Symbolizing means assigning to entities and events meanings which are external to them and not able to be grasped by themselves alone. Language is the moat typical symbolic system within culture;

(4) Culture is integrated. Each aspect of culture is tied in with the other aspects.

Culture is normally regarded as comprising, with some slight variations, the following four sub-systems:

(1) Techno-economic System:

ecology (flora, fauna, climate, etc.) [1];

ways of production, exchange, and distribution of goods;

crafts, technology, and science;

artifacts.

(2) Social System:

social classes and groups;

kinship system (typology, sex and marriage, procreation and paternity, size of the family, etc.);

politics and the law;

education;

sports and entertainment;

customs;

general history [2].

(3) Ideational System:

cosmology;

religion;

magic and witchcraft;

folklore;

artistic creations as images;

values (moral, aesthetic, etc.);

cognitive focus and thinking patterns.

ideology.

(4) Linguistic System:

phonology and graphemics;

grammar (morphology and syntax);

semantics and pragmatics.

All the ingredients in these four sub-systems may be responsible for some presuppositions that are fundamentally different from those bred by other cultures and hence possibly lead to some misreadings when translation or other forms of communication are conducted across two cultures. In the following I will consider some of these culture-bound presuppositions as observed in mistranslated texts.

1. Cultural Presuppositions Related to the Techno-economic System:

At the turn of the twentieth century, when Western and Russian literatures were first introduced into China on a large scale, drawing-room used to be translated into Chinese as tuhua shi (artist’s studio) for the obvious reason that the interior structure of Western-styled houses was rather alien then to most Chinese, for whom a room with a similar function as the drawing-room was tangwu (the central room or the main hall of a house) which is however not a place which the guests withdraw into after a dinner, but a room where the guests are received and where meals are taken as well. With the presupposition subconsciously in mind that the room in a Western-styled house which functioned like a tangwu (“hall-room”) would be called likewise, the translators did not bother to find out in a dictionary what a drawing-room really was and rendered it into the Chinese language in a mistaken way.

2. Cultural Presuppositions Related to the Social System:

Courtesy expressions immediately reflect the socio-behavioral patterns of a culture. The notion of courtesy seems to be something universal, but people from different cultures might have different ideas as to what are courtesy expressions and what are not. Traditionally, e.g. a Chinese may greet a friend or acquaintance by asking Have you had your meal? or Where are you going? A Westerner on the same occasion would, however, say something like Hello!, Good morning!, Nice day, isn’t it?, etc. When meeting a friend who has just arrived from a long journey, the Chinese would conventionally say: You must have had a tiring journey. The Westerner would ask instead: Did you have a nice trip? or Did you enjoy your trip?

One principle in the information theory states that the greater the probability of the occurrence of an event, the smaller the amount of information the message contains about it. In the case of language, it is apparent that the more frequently an expression may occur, the less meaningful it becomes. Since courtesy expressions are marked by a high frequency of usage in the cultures they belong to, their meaning is almost exclusively pragmatic. When they are literally transferred into a language of another culture on the presupposition that the target language society has the same pattern of phatic communication, they may nevertheless be taken in their referential meaning and cause misunderstanding on the part of the target receiver.

3. Cultural Presuppositions Related to the Ideational System:

Cultural presuppositions in connection with the ideational system are responsible for perhaps the greatest number of translational misreadings because the worlds different cultures face differ much less than the ways wherein members of different cultures look at the reality of the world they are exposed to. For instance, both Chinese culture and Anglo-American culture regard time as a continuum, but when referring to the past and the future in terms of back and ahead, these two cultures seem to have adopted different datum points. A traditional Chinese seems to be facing to the past, perceiving what had happened as ahead of him and what is yet to come as behind him. A native English speaker, however, appears to assume just the opposite viewpoint. For example:

But we are getting ahead of the story.

Danshi women shuodao gushi de houmian qule. [Lit.: But we are getting to the back of the story. ]

Negligence of this difference in temporal perspective would probably result in a wrong translation of the following passage, whose context does not provide any clue to the relative earliness or lateness of the time mentioned:

The first is in the two essays of part II on culture and biological evolution, where the fossil datings given in the original essays have been definitely superseded. The dates have, in general, been moved back in time .... [Geertz, 1973: preface]

Buddhism played a major part in the evolution of Chinese culture and contributed to the Chinese language many expressions, one of which being santou liubei (“three hands and six arms”) The divine trinity of Hinduism are characterized by more heads, arms, and hands than mortal men. Brahma, the Creator of the Universe, has four heads and four hands; Vishnu, the preserver, has four hands; and Siva, God of Destruction and Reproduction, has five heads, four hands, and three eyes. Buddhism remolded Hindu gods and introduced two patterns of the shaping of god’s heads, arms, and hands, one being that of four hands and four eyes, the other being that of three heads and six arms. The latter has entered everyday speech as well as literary language. It is not quite possible for the Western audience to know that three heads and six arms means in Chinese superhuman wisdom and power as of Buddhist gods. To prevent the possible misreading of its contextual meaning by the target reader, the phrase is culturally adapted in the following translation:

Tan Zhaodi peng bude ma? Ni shi santou liubei, wo ye gan peng. [Zhou Erfu. Shanghai de Zaochen.]

Is Tan Chao-ti some sacred being that no one dares to offend? But I dare, even if you’re a demigod! [Trans. A.C. Barnes]

Different cultures may cherish significantly different presuppositions in terms of values and attitudes. While Western culture prizes the individual, for example, traditional Chinese culture lays great stress on the group. It is not at all accidental that in the following illustration:

There was nothing mass produced about the school. But if it was individualistic, it also had discipline. [Agatha Christie. Cat Among the Pigeons]

the translator should turn the phrase mass produced favorably (and wrongly) into daliang chu rencai de producing a large number of talented personnel, because in the Chinese mind, group behavior, which tends to be socially commended, is usually regarded as an antithesis to individualistic action, which is often met with suspicion and disapproval in the society.

As the basis of political and economic systems and a major shaping force of modern society, ideology has been the cause of many cultural presuppositions that effected misreading of one kind or another. Piotr Kuhiwezak (1990:125) makes an insightful analysis of the misreading of Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke by both the author’s own country and the West. In The Joke (Zert), Kundera tells a love story set in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s. The main characters Ludvik, Kostka, Jaroslav and Helena are at university, at a time when the country is undergoing significant social and political change. The crucial event in the novel is nothing but a joke, which Ludvik plays on his solemn girlfriend Marketa. This joke is simply a postcard in which Ludvik ridicules the official political jargon of the day: Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! But what Ludvik considers funny, the rest of the world sees as serious ideological subversion. So everything that follows from this point of the novel results directly from the fact that none of the characters shares Ludvik’s sense of humor. And this is exactly why Ludvik, abandoned by his former friends, is expelled from the university and sent to a penal military unit in Ostrava. During long years of hard work in Ostrava he falls in love with Lucie. The relationship, very fragile from the start, does not last long, because the girl finds it impossible to reconcile her love for Ludvik, with sexuality. Years after his release, Ludvik goes to his native Moravia where he meets his university colleagues again. The purpose of his trip is to take his revenge on those of them who openly contributed to his banishment from the university. However, the carefully devised and executed plan misfires, because fifteen years after the event nothing is the same: history has thoroughly erased the once-clear line which separated Ludvik’s former enemies from his former friends.

Kundera has been acclaimed as one of the greatest writers of our time. His works are almost always characterized by an obsessive concern with and persistent deliberation upon the nature of existence and the conditions of modern man’s life and spiritual state. Their aim, as the author insists, has been to analyze the actions of ordinary people, caught up in situations generated by their own thoughts and their own actions. The Joke, which was Kundera’s first major work, well demonstrates this feature of his novels. The author’s concern about the universal instead of the particular in this work may be best illustrated by the following passage in which Ludvik asks himself a question about the significance of his own actions, and which sums up the main theme of the novel ― Ludvik’s quest for rational patterns in life:

Do love stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, I had clung to a few superstitions ― the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me has a sense beyond itself, means something, that life in its day-to-day events speaks to us about itself so that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live in comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it all an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t seem to rid myself of the need to decipher my life continually. [Kundera, 1983:140; Quo. in Kuhiwezak 1990:127]

The novel was first published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, one year before the Prague Spring . In the following two years it was translated into almost all European languages. After the Soviet troops invaded Prague in 1968, the novel was denounced as a pamphlet against socialism and was banned, and Kundera himself was forced to leave his country to live in France. In 1969, its first English translation by David Hamblyn and Oliver Stallybrass was published by Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, London. But this version appeared in a mutilated form because the translators and publishers took The Joke for a political fantasy that became reality a few weeks after its publication and rewrote accordingly, cutting, pasting, and shifting the chapters around, leaving out what they considered the insignificant digressions and repetitions in good faith that this would give the novel a proper chronological order. By doing that, they not only destroyed the novel’s polyphonic structure, which contributes greatly to the artistic appeal of the work, but, more importantly, gave its readers the wrong impression that the novel could only have been written in a society where Marxism had been taken seriously (Kuhiwezak, 1990:128). In both Czech and the West, The Joke was not taken for something it actually is ― a treatise about human experience in general, but for something which it is not, i.e. a treatise about human experience in a particular socio-historical environment. In both cases, what underlay the misreading of Kundera was the political and ideological presuppositions deep-rooted in the minds of the parties concerned. Just as Kundera observes, the common folly of ideological presumptuousness (in the Eastern countries) and over-simplification by the press (in the West) prevented this artistic work from telling its own truth in its own words (Kundera, 1991: vii).

Kundera claims that, for some years, he spent more time correcting translations of his novels and chasing the journalists who misrepresented his views than in writing the original works. Under his protest, the 1969 version was withdrawn from the market and most libraries. An edition in which the omitted passages were reinstated appeared in 1970 as the Penguin Books hardcover edition. In 1983 Faber and Faber published the new American translation of The Joke, approved by the author and made by Michael Heim. The story of The Joke thus came to a happy conclusion, but the implications it carries about the underlying relationships between conflicting ideologies in the modern world and the gross misreadings on the part of translators and publishers will be persistently significant.

4. Cultural Presuppositions Related to the Linguistic System:

Cultural presuppositions may sometimes be traced to the linguistic, especially semantic structures of a language. The most typical case is one wherein comparable words in different languages may carry strikingly different associations. In Chinese, for instance, vinegar is often another name for jealousy, e.g. chichu (“eat vinegar” ― to be jealous). In English, however, the word is connotative of ill-tempered speech, character, etc. One may say that someone’s remarks are made with a strong note of vinegar. Sour or vinegary means in English bad-tempered, peevish (“a sour mood”), ill-disposed or bitter (“sour toward one’s former associates”), but in Chinese sourness or being sour is connected with pedantry, so a pedantic scholar is often said to be a sour one.

In extreme cases, deep-rooted cultural presuppositions and dogmatically held cultural values may even prompt the translator to misrepresent the source message purposefully. This may be observed in some Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures. Chinese Buddhism is in many ways quite different from the Hindu Buddhism, although Chinese Buddhists, especially the priests, all claim some sutras to be the foundation of the doctrine of the sect they each belong to. Buddhist creed was in a large measure sinolized owing to the translation of sutras. Such basic notions of Buddhism as anitya (impermanence), anatman (no independent individual existence), and sunyata (emptiness or void) have never entered into Chinese philosophy as they originally were; they were received in line with Chinese ideology (Jin, 1984:212).

An important source of interference with sutra translation was Chinese values, especially those rooted in Confucianism, which the sutra translators made an effort to accommodate to. For instance, the exceptional reverence in Chinese consciousness for one’s teachers and superiors led the translator of Fa Hua Qing to rewrite arbitrarily the sentence An enlightened self (Pratyekabuddha) opened his eyes to the Truth without looking to his master for help (anacaryaka). into he listened to the Buddha’s law and accepted it as being true. This is just the opposite of its original meaning. (Nakamura, 1981:209)

Such cases of deliberate misrepresentation are especially common when sex is involved in the original. Generally speaking, Indians are indifferent about sexual matters. They are plain-spoken in describing sexual affairs and accept a description so far as it is that of an objective fact. German scholars, among the modern Europeans, usually translated literally the sexual explanations mentioned in Indian literatures. On the contrary, English scholars in many cases used the Latin or euphemistic explanation instead of the literal translation. Chinese translators of sutras resembled the English gentlemen in equivocating about expressions involving sex, because educated Chinese, influenced by Confucianism, have an aversion toward writings about sex. A Pali text mentions that one of the defilements connected with drinking stimulants is that those who drink liquor are apt to display their sexual organs. The Chinese translator turned this phrase into those who drink liquor are apt to become angry (Nakamura, 1981:260-261). This puritan attitude toward sex is still perceivable now and then in the translations published in present-day China. The translators of an essay carried in an well-known bilingual English-learning magazine published in Beijing, for example, turned the phrase Hollywood’s great sex object of the 1980s into: Hollywood’s great comedian of the 1980s (The World of English. 1985. No.2. 40-41).

The Chinese translation of the title of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is also indicative of the interference of cultural presuppositions with the translator’s reading of the original. As the English title suggests, the theme of the novel is tinted with a philosophical, perhaps somewhat nihilistic tone of color. But the title of the Chinese version, back-translated, reads the Unbearable Lightness in Life. The replacement of the preposition of with in actually produces a major change in the meaning of the title: it effaces the metaphysical overtones (which are certainly not so positive and inspiring according to the prevalent ideology of contemporary Chinese society) of the original work. Linguistically, the translators could not have confused the proper meaning of the prepositions “of” and “in”. They made the present choice most probably out of cultural considerations.

Cultural presuppositions should be brought to the full awareness of translators and teachers of foreign languages for two reasons. First, a correct interpretation of the source message may rest upon a due understanding of the relevant facts or features of the source culture. In many cases, however, the presuppositions a translator harbors about the source culture may be based upon the realities of his/her own culture. If the source and target cultures differ significantly in relevant aspects, the source message may be wrongly deciphered. This is especially true where linguistic ambiguities are involved. We may illustrate this by considering two examples from the English translations of classic Chinese literature. The first example is a stanza in “Qiyue” (The Seventh Moon), a narrative poem from Shi Jing or the Book of Songs, an anthology of verse dating from the 11th to the 6th century BC. The poem runs as follows:

Qiyue liuhuo, jiuyue shouyi.

Chunri zaiyang, youming canggeng.

Nü zhi yikuang, zun bi weihang, yuan cai rousang.

Chunri chichi, caifan yiyi.

Nü xin shangbei, dai ji gongzi tonggui.

[In the seventh month the Fire-star declines,

In the ninth month winter garments are handed out.

Spring days bring us the sun’s warmth,

And the orioles sing.

Girls carrying deep baskets

Go along narrow pathways,

Look for young mulberry leaves.

As spring days lengthen,

In crowds they gather the southernwood.

A girl’s heart is sick and troubled,

Fearing that she may have to go home with her lord.]

― Trans. Irving Y. Lo (Wang, Yuexi & Wang Enbao [eds.], 1994:64-65)

This poem depicts the year-long toil of the slaves of the Western Zhou Dynasty. The cited stanza portrays a scene in which a group of slave women, carrying baskets, set out in sunny spring days to gather mulberry leaves and southernwood. But despite the lovely weather, one slave girl feels sad and troubled because she is afraid that the profligate son of her owner might force her to go back home with him later. In an English anthology of Chinese literature (Birch et al. eds., 1980:24), the last line of the stanza is rendered as:

A girl’s heart is sick and sad

Till with her lord she can go home.

This translation must appear rather ridiculous to the Chinese readers because it presents a picture which is exactly contrary to the original one, making it look as if the slave girl just could not wait to be with her lover or husband. Superficially, the mistranslation was due to the ambiguities of the meaning of two words in this line, i.e., dai, which may mean either almost or fear in this context; and ji, which has two apparently equally tenable senses here: till and with, both of which finds explicit expression in the English version. Nevertheless, a Chinese reader, even though not at all versed in classic Chinese, would almost never interpret the line as the translator in Cyril’s anthology does. So there should be some more profound reasons for the translator’s misreading of the line. Since both the senses carried by each of the two words are linguistically plausible in their verbal context, what really counts in this case must not be language, but culture: the true senses intended by the author can only be determined by a reference to the poem’s cultural context. It has been commonly observed that in traditional Chinese society women’s feelings towards the male sex were generally characterized by bashfulness and reservedness. They tended to show aloofness or even dread to those who were superior to them in economical and social status. The translator of the poem in Cyril’s anthology seems to have neglected this basic fact about the mentality of traditional Chinese women and have reasoned from the standpoint and experience of his own culture, thus making the wrong choices from the two semantic possibilities provided by the source signs.

Another example comes from the 14th-century Chinese historical novel Sanguo Yanyi (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms). In the preface to his translation, Moss Roberts quotes what King Liu Bei says in Chapter 15 to comfort his sworn brother Zhang Fei, who is filled with deep remorse for having lost, through negligence, the city of Xuzhou together with Liu’s two wives entrusted by Liu to his care: Xiongdi ru shouzu, qizi ru yifu (One’s brothers are like his limbs while his wives are like his clothes.) but misrepresents it as: A brother is a limb. Wives and children are but clothes. In earlier vernacular Chinese (in which the novel was written), the expression qizi may be used either as a single word, denoting wife, as is typical of modern usage; or as a phrase composed of two separate lexemes: qi wife, and zi children, as is the case in the 8th-century Chinese poet Du Fu’s famous lines:

Quekan qizi chou he zai,

Manjuan shishu xi yu kuang.

[I gaze at my wife and children, all my grief forgotten.

And roll up my papers at random, wild with joy.]

Since qizi is used in both these two senses in earlier vernacular Chinese (and in modern Chinese as well), neither dictionaries nor the linguistic context is able to assist the translator in deciding rightly on what Liu Bei means by qizi. One has to resort to traditional Chinese values for a proper judgment of what the prince has in mind as he uses the word. It should be realized that women in old China held a very low social position as against men. They were often no better than their husbands’ servants or slaves. On the other hand, however, both men and women would be overjoyed to have a son because, according to Confucianism, which was the orthodox ethic guides for the Chinese society during nearly two thousand years, of the three cardinal offenses against filial piety, having no male heir is the greatest. Ancient Chinese men (and perhaps quite a number of present-day Chinese men as well) would regard their wives as clothes, but their sons would always be their darlings. (Liu, Shaoming, 1984:234-235) This fact, however, was probably somewhat alien to Roberts, who chose to decode qizi as wife and children merely on his linguistic knowledge that this is the sense in which the lexical unit is most commonly used in ancient Chinese.

The second reason that cultural presuppositions should draw sufficient attention from translators and teachers of foreign languages is that communicative errors caused by them are usually more covert and harder to be detected than grammatical failures, and hence may cause serious misunderstanding on the part of the target receiver. For instance, a Westerner who is met in the street by a Chinese acquaintance who has only a superficial knowledge of English and is greeted by him/her with a Chinese greeting Where are you going? may feel puzzled or even uncomfortable, thinking that the inquirer is prying into his/her privacy.

* *

Nida and Reyburn (1981:2) rightly points out: In fact, difficulties arising out of differences of culture constitute the most serious problems for translators and have produces the most far-reaching misunderstandings among readers. These difficulties exist largely because of the fact that all translators work in some specific socio-cultural contexts. It is just inevitable that they be under the sway of some specific presuppositions prescribed by the culture in which they were brought up. To minimize the chance of misreading the original from the point of view of their own cultures, translators need to be aware of and constantly alert of, among other things, the Vorstruktur (“pre-structure”) imposed upon their consciousness by their own cultural background. In order to avoid any potential misreading or misinterpretation of the source text on the part of the target reader, it is desirable that translators make appropriate use of target language resources to clarify any potentially misleading senses of the linguistic signs in the target context.

In this paper I have focused almost exclusively on the negative facet of cultural misreading for the simple reason that it caused misunderstanding, hatred, and even bloodshed on too many occasions in human history. Before closing my discussion, however, I should do justice to cultural misreading by pointing out that in some cases it was indeed turned to good account on the part of the receiving culture. Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the pioneer Jesuit missionary who came to China in the late 16th century, for example, deliberately misread the Confucian notion of Heaven, which refers largely to the objective laws embodied by Nature, as something basically the same as the Christian conception of Dieu or God, which points nevertheless to a personified supernatural being and a unique creative entity. Ricci’s misreading made the notion of God appearing closer to the Chinese mind and whereby aided in the acceptance and wide spreading of Christianity in China for at least a century. Nietzsche (1844-1990)’s philosophy, which was marked by an intense attack on the slave morality of Christianity and an ideal of Überermensch or Superman, who would impose his will on the weak and worthless, was claimed to be a precursor of Nazism. But in the first few decades of this century, when China was torn apart by the invasions of the big powers, Nietzsche’s Superhuman philosophy was misread by the leaders of the New Culture Movement (e.g. Mao Dun [1898-1981]) as some grave warning to the weak nations. Mao Dun interpreted Nietzsche’s argument for power and conquest from just the opposite point of view, claiming that weak nations must struggle against power and fight for their liberation if they do not wish to be slaves. This creative misreading not only positively influenced the national salvation movement in China at the turn of the century, but might also be regarded as a sort of enrichment to Nietzsche’s philosophy (See Yue, 1995:111).

Today, when the human race is going into a new century wherein different nations and cultures cannot but learn to live peacefully on a planet which is becoming increasingly small and crowded, and when developments in science and information technology are rendering us more and more opportunities to know each other better, purposeful cultural misreading out of good will is apparently not so desirable as it used to be. We need, perhaps more urgently than ever, cool-headed mutual understanding, more mutual appreciation, and to that end, less ethnocentrism and less prejudice.

Notes:

^{1 In a strict sense ecology is not cultural. It is
included in the techno-economic system on the consideration that it interacts
with the ways of material production and consumption of a culture and sometimes
seriously affects the very subsistence of the culture.}

² General history is a record of the past people and events of a society. Many of these would have a sustaining impact on the later stages of the growth of the culture on which they left their footprints.

References:

Bassnett, Susan & André Lefevere (Eds.) 1990. Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter.

Benedict, Ruth. 1959. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Bock, Philip. 1979. Modern Cultural Anthropology (3rd. ed.). New York: Alfred & Knopf.

Bullock, Alan & Oliver Stallybrass (Eds.) 1977. The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. London: Fontana/Collins. xix+684pp.

Birch, Cyril et al. (Eds.). 1980-1981. Anthology of Chinese Literature. 2 vols. New York: Grove. Vol I.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretations of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Jin, Kemu. 1984. Bijiao Wenhua Lunji [Comparative Culture: an anthology]. Beijing: Sanlian. 266pp.

Kuhiwezak, Piotr. 1990. Translation as Appropriation: The Case of Milan Kundera’s The Joke. In Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere (Eds.), 1990. 118-130.

Kundera, Milan. 1983. The Joke. London: Faber and Faber. [Chinese edn.: 1991. Wanxiao (Jing Kaixuan, Trans.). Beijing: Writers. vii+325pp.]

__. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. [Chinese edn.: 1989. Shengming Zhong Buneng Chengshou zhi Qing (Han, Shaogong & Han Gang, Trans.). Beijing: Writers. 345pp.]

Lefevere, André. 1990. Translation: Its Genealogy in the West. In Susan Bassnett & André Lefevere (Eds.), 1990.

Liu, Shaoming. 1984. Fangcun Yi Luan ― Lun Yishi zhi Nan. In the Federation of Chinese Translators & the Editorial Board of Zhongguo Fanyi [The Journal of Chinese Translation] (Eds.), Fanyi Yanjiu Lunwen Ji [An Anthology of Translation Studies]. 2 vols. Beijing: Waiyu Jiaoxue yu Yanjiu. Vol. I.

Nakamura, Hajame. 1981. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples (Philip Wiener, Rev. Eng. trans. and ed.). Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press.

Nida, Eugene & William Reyburn 1981. Meaning Across Cultures. American Society of Missiology Series, No. 4. New York: Orbis Books. vi+90pp.

Wang, Yuexi & Wang Enbao (Eds.). 1994. 100 Chinese Classical Poems in English. Beijing: Beijing Institute of Languages Press. 515pp.

Yue, Daiyun & Alain Le Pichon. 1995. Dujiaoshou yu Long (The Unicorn and the Dragon). Beijing: Peking University Press. 230pp.

About the Author

Ke Ping was born in Nanjing, China, and was educated at Nanjing University, where he read English Language and Literature and obtained his M.A. in 1987. From 1987 to 1990 he was with the English Faculty of Peking University, teaching English-Chinese Translation, Chinese-English Translation and other courses. Since 1990 he has been teaching and doing research at Nanjing University. In 1993-94 he studied linguistics as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He has published about 20 papers in the fields of English literature, linguistics and translation theory. His work A Textbook of English-Chinese and Chinese-English Translation (Beijing: Peking University Press. 1991, 1993.), which adopts a socio-semiotic approach to translation and represents a major effort toward systematizing translation studies, has been well received in his country (including Taiwan). At present he is teaching Writing, Contrastive Linguistics, and Translation. The areas of study he is now engaged in include translation theory and cultural history. He is now Associate Professor of English at Nanjing University.

Correspondence: Prof. Ke Ping, Department of English, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, CHINA

柯平：1987年毕业于南京大学研究生院，获英语语言文学硕士学位。1987-1990年在北京大学英语系任讲师，主讲英语精读、英汉翻译与汉英翻译等课程。1990年回到母校任教。1993-1994年任英国剑桥大学语言学系访问学者。现为南京大学外语学院副教授，硕士研究生导师。主要研究方向为翻译理论、语言学和文化史，著有《英汉与汉英翻译》一书及论文近20余篇，译有英美文学作品多部（篇）、艺术图书三部。

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Abstract of the paper presented to the International Translation Symposium, Beijing Foreign Languages University, China, 1997

Cultural Presuppositions and Misreading

(Abstract)

Ke Ping

Despite its apparent undesirability, misreading constantly occurs in translations of all ages. Since translation consists basically in understanding and making others understand , misreading on the translator’s part almost invariably results in the distortion of the source message and consequently in one form or another of failure in the communication between the source writer and the target reader.

Of the many possible factors that are explanatory of misreadings in translation, presupposition merits our special attention, because it may substantially and systematically affect our interpretation of events without our knowing it. This paper is an attempt at pinpointing the internal relationships between cultural presuppositions and misreading in translation. (By cultural presupposition is meant the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ideas that are culturally rooted and that are generally shared by persons, but rarely if ever described or defined, simply because they seem so basic and obvious as not to require verbal formulation [after Nida, 1981:14]).

Culture is normally regarded as comprising, with some slight variations, four major component parts, i.e. (1) techno-economic system; (2) social system; (3) ideational system; and (4) linguistic system. All the ingredients in the four systems may be responsible for some presuppositions that are fundamentally different from those bred by other cultures and hence possibly lead to some kind of misreadings when translation or other forms of communication is conducted across two cultures. However, the most remarkable cultural presuppositions underlying translational misreading are related to a culture’s ecological environment, social institutions, general history, religious faiths, ideology, values, as well as the semantic structure of its language.

To minimize the chance of misreading the original, the translator should be aware of and constantly alert of, among other things, the Vorstruktur (“pre-structure”) imposed on his/her consciousness by his/her own culture. In order to avoid any potential misreading or misinterpretation of the source text on the part of the target reader, it is advisable that some form of semantic compensations be incorporated into the translation where desirable.