A Comparative Study of Folk Culture Translation from the Perspective of Cultural Presupposition—Taking Four English Versions of Biancheng as an Example

Abstract

The rich cultural presuppositions contained in Chinese folk culture have important values in the translation of folk culture and cross-cultural communication. In order to explore how the translator deals with the cultural presupposition, this paper takes the concept of cultural presupposition as the starting point and adopts qualitative research and case study methods to make a multidimensional comparative analysis of the translation of folk culture involved in the four English versions of Biancheng, which finds that Jeffrey C. Kinkley usually takes compensatory methods to achieve the equivalent of cultural presuppositions; Gladys Yang is loyal to the original text, while omits some folk culture details; Emily Hahn and Shing Mo-Lei, Ching Ti and Robert Payne may not have a thorough understanding of the cultural presuppositions implied in the original text. In order to achieve the equivalent of cultural presupposition, and help to eliminate the information and meaning gaps in the spread of folk culture for the target language readers, translators need to take the compensatory methods like interpretation in the text and then establish semantic coherence, so as to achieve the purpose of transmitting Chinese folk culture.