[[alternative]]The Commentary on the Translation of A Child in the Principal’s Office: The development of a Translator’s Cultural Awareness Embodied in the Interpretation of Cultural Information

[[abstract]]This thesis aims at revealing how a translator’s cultural awareness may influence his/her interpretation of the cultural information in the texts. “Cultural awareness” here refers to a translator’s ability to recognize the cultural information as well as the sequential process of tackling with such information. A translator, as the agent of translation, has the power to interpret the source text and determine how it should be transformed into the target text. Therefore, whether the target text can fully convey the meanings of all dimensions of the source text greatly depends on the translator’s ability to utilize his/her cultural awareness. In this thesis, I drew my experience of translating A Child in the Principal’s Office as an example, analyzed the cultural information embodied in the form and the content of the original text, and compared with several versions of my translations which were rendered at different moments in the process of translation for the purpose of finding out the same and the different among such versions. Then, I examined whether my cultural awareness changed during the translation process, and, if it did, what impacts this change had on my interpretation of the source text. This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One, Introduction, includes a general statement of the motivations and the purposes of this thesis, a brief introduction of the author of A Child in the Principal’s Office, and a comprehensive analysis of this book. Chapter Two, Literature Review, presents some of the translation studies and discourses relevant to cultural awareness and the translator’s power to interpret. Chapter Three is Methodology, in which I adopt George Steiner’s perspective of hermeneutics according to which translation is viewed as the hermeneutic motion and the process of restituting balance between the source text and the target text. Such perspective is applied as the theoretical basis of the evaluating and commenting on my translations. Chapter Four is Evaluation and Comment on the Translations of Child in the Principal’s Office. In this chapter, cultural information is categorized into Form and Content and the passages in the text are accordingly presented and then analyzed so as to see whether the cultural information of my translations is equivalent to that of the source text. If not, further analyses are made to explore the reasons for the imbalance. Chapter Five, Conclusion, consists of two sections as follows: (1) the comprehensive evaluation and comments on the development of my culture awareness during the translation process and my interpretation of cultural information in the texts; (2) several major principles to which translators should pay attention in search of the balance between the source text and the target text.