Cultranslatology in China

Culture has long been noticed in translation practice, and theoretical research on translation and culture has a history of over 40 years. Unlike the cultural schools of translation studies in the West, Chinese scholars have been studying the construction of cultranslatology based on the ontology of translation, in order to establish cultranslatology as a sub discipline of translation studies. Th e goal of this article is to study the emergence, establishment, and development of cultranslatology in China, reveal the contributions of Chinese scholars to cultranslatology and even general translation studies, and provide a basis for further promoting cultranslatology. In China, cultural translation research began with the translation of culturemes. Cultural translation is understood as the translation of culturemes. Th e study of cultureme translation has promoted the understanding of translation. Translation is not only a language conversion, but more importantly, it has cultural characteristics. Th e establishment of this property has expanded the research on translation methodology, translation strategies, and other general translation topics. When the text is revealed to be the highest level of culturemes, cultural transplantation becomes an important dimension of translation studies, laying a solid foundation for the creation of cultranslatology. While exploring the construction of cultranslatology in the sense of translation ontology, many Chinese scholars have also adopted the research orientation of the cultural turn in Western translation studies and conducted fruitful external research on translation. However, this has to some extent also aff ected the development of cultranslatology, despite the publication of a large number of research results on culture and translation. Since the publication of the fi rst monograph Cultranslatology in the mid-1990s, aft er a quarter century, another Cultranslatology has been published, which has more systematically and completely constructed this emerging discipline. Cultranslatology includes four research directions: metatheory, historical research, basic theory, and applied research. As the core part of cultranslatology, the basic theory not only requires descriptive research on the process of cultural translation, but also interpretive research on the results of cultural translation. Th ese are two basic conditions that must be met to meet the strict characteristics of the discipline. Nowadays, the basic theory and metatheory of cultranslatology still need to be continuously developed, and the applied research in this discipline is still insuffi cient, so it has broad research prospects.