Cultural Translations

culture. Second, the film helped me understand the theme in the novella better, just as Hewsonand Martin said, ‘people might well consult a translation in order to have a better (or more complete)understanding of the original.’ 17 In this case, the film is a successful ‘translation’ of the novellafrom verbal expressions to visual images. Third, the story itself made me believe that it canbe understood and appreciated universally regardless of differences between nationalities, races,cultures and languages.In the process of translation, one of the difficulties is how to translate the Maori names ofpeople and places, and how to translate the names of plants and animals that are native to NewZealand. I find it easy to translate abstract concepts because they can be explained by addingwords. But the names will not sound like names if they carry explanatory words. Also, I had totake a balance between allowing the Chinese people to understand the foreign names based ontheir own culture on one hand, and keeping the Maori-ness of the names on the other. The readershall face a text that is both understandable and puzzling. It is the process of ‘domesticating’ theforeignness of the original text, and ‘foreignizing’ the host language—the Chinese in this case.The strategy consciously or unconsciously employed in my translation somehow echoes Schleiermacher’ssuggestion that aspects of the original language (the English and Maori) be incorporatedinto the target language (the Chinese) in order to enrich the latter, to make it open up tootherness. 18Inside the novella, the naming of the heroin is one of the most important developments of thestory. To the great-grandfather Koro, naming a girl Kahu after the primary ancestor and hero ofthe tribe is unbearably offensive. That will not only belittle the ancestor hero, but also will givean impression that a female can imitate the hero. He fiercely opposes such a naming. On thecontrary, his wife Nanny Flowers, their grandson and his wife do not see any problem in givingthe girl such a name, because they want to connect the girl with the tribe. Obviously they have adifferent cultural value from that of Koro’s. Meanwhile such a naming prophesies the future ofthe girl, just as Friedman argued, ‘Cultural identity and conflict are retracted in names given tocharacters; names parents give their children; renaming by oneself or by others; nicknames; andplace names.’ 19Because each Chinese character has its own meaning, choosing proper kanji to represent thephonetic signs of the original Maori names needs to be carefully done. In the novella, there areabundant acoustic images of songs, sounds and voices, and visual images of the ocean. It is almostimperative that I use the kanji associated with those images, such as, ge ( 歌 ), fan ( 泛 ), lang( 浪 ), tang ( 淌 ), etc. while translating the Maori names. However these images do not appear inthe Japanese translation because the katakana are used to represent the names. In other words,the Chinese translation has added more images related to the ocean and music, which the origi-1617 Hewson, Lance, Jacky Martin, 1991 Redefining Translation: The Variational Approach, London: Routledge,p.143.18 Fuall, Katherine, ‘Introduction’, in Fuall, Katherine M., 2004, Translation and Culture, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania:Bucknell University Press, p.15.19 Friedman, Sara, ‘Names in Annie Proulx’s According Crimes and Close Range: Wyoming Stories and TheirHebrew Translation’ in Fuall, Katherine M., 2004, Translation and Culture, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: BucknellUniversity Press, p.107.Nanyan Guo