Abstract: It’s agreed that translation should transfer the original text as faithfully and correctly as possible. But owing to differences between the two languages, translating errors and defects are inevitable. Because of the inevitably existent gap in material life, traditional history, politics, social system and developing process between China and English-speaking countries, we suffer from blunders from misunderstanding and misinterpretations, which hinder greatly the smoothness and promotion of intercultural exchange process. Thus, it’s necessary for English learners to analyze the factors that may cause misinterpretation in order to reduce mistranslation in the cross-culture communications. This paper briefly introduces the categories of mistranslation, analyzed the main causes of mistranslation, and emphasized discussing cultural mistranslation, raised possible methods to deal with this phenomenon, and mainly hoped that some mistranslation will be avoided in the further translation process to improve the cross-cultural communications.
Key Words: mistranslation; cultural mistranslation; blunders; cross-cultural communication
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1. Categories of Mistranslation 2
1.1 Technical Mistranslation 3
1.2 Cultural Mistranslation 3
2. Causes of Mistranslation 4
2.1 An Analysis of One Relevant Research on the Causes of Mistranslation 5
2.2 Causes of Mistranslation from the Aspect of Non-cultural Factors 7
2.3 Causes of Mistranslation from the Aspect of Culture 7
3. Cultural Blunders in Translation and its Negative Effects 10
3.1 Examples of Economic Losses Caused by Cultural Mistranslations 10
3.2 Examples of Political Failures Caused by Cultural Mistranslations 11
4. Ways to Reduce the Problems of Mistranslation 12
4.1 Ways to Reduce Technical Mistranslations 12
4.2 Ways to Reduce Cultural Mistranslations 13
5. Conclusion 14
Bibliography 17
