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are among all peoples. It also helps to cultural exchanges and become another way of gaining knowledge of other cultures. What’s more, through translation, every culture can contact with other culture of varying types.

In his book entitled About Translation, Peter Newmark proposes five wider purposes of translation, among which three are related to intercultural communication:

(1) The first purpose is to contribute to understanding and peace between nations, groups and individuals;
(2) The second purpose of translation is to transmit knowledge in plain, appropriate and accessible language;
(3) The third purpose is to explain and mediate between cultures on the basis of a common humanity, respecting their strengths, implicitly exposing their weakness.

Such means serve as lowering barriers between countries and promoting international understanding, cultural exchange should be one of the primary goals of translation.

To sum up, as a human activity, translating is essentially a communicative process. It has been recognized that communication theory should be used to explain the complex phenomenon of translation, while translation itself takes socio-cultural messages as the object of its operation.  Observing these interrelationships, we will find that cultural studies and the cultural perspective of study has appeared in translation studies. 

PartⅢ. Cultural Barriers in Translating the Image in Poetry

A poem is the source of the artistic creation, which usually set within a socio-cultural situation; therefore poetry is often a mirror to the condition of a nation’s culture. Different countries have different languages and cultures. In most cases, a particular language is the product of the country’s unique culture. Just as Peter Newmark once figured out, “Frequently where there is cultural focus, there is a translation problem due to cultural ‘gap’ or ‘distance’ between the source and target language.” (Peter Newmark, 2001: 94) Whenever the translation is concerned, the cultural issue is inevitable. Due to that each nation has its unique cultural background, traditional customs, religious, philosophical, and values, images in a particular culture, rarely have precise correspondence in any other culture. Therefore, in practice, the translator will inevitably meet the transfer of cultural specialization, which is probably the greatest difficulty for them. Such peculiar fields are termed as “cultural barriers” by Roman Jackobson. In discussing the complexity of translation, he proposed ironically that:

Both the practice and theory of translation abounds with intricacies, from time to time attempts are made to sever the Gordian knot by proclaiming the dogma of untranslatability. (Bassnett, 2005) 

So in this chapter, the author will illustrate the cultural barriers in translating the poetic image one by one.

3.1 Social traditions and customs

Every nation has its unique traditions and customs. The existence of such tradition and customs lead to the diversity of views on various things in life. As a result, different nations may have different meanings with the same image. The following serves as an illustration of such images. The Chinese word “柳” refers to the willow tree, but in Chinese poetry, “柳” as an imag本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。