A Cultural Examination of Shapiro’s Translation of the Marsh Heroes’ Nicknames

Abstract

What roles the culture plays in translating has been a focus in the translating circle. The stratifica-tional relation of language to cultural context in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) makes it necessary that the process of translation should take the cultural factors into consideration. The present paper aims to discuss the parts that culture plays in translating by analyzing some prob-lems in Shapiro’s translation of the nicknames in the Outlaws of the Marsh. The paper starts off from the relation of language to culture context in translation in an SFL angle, followed with a brief introduction to the connotation and the artistic magic of the Marsh Heroes’ Nicknames and some examples of Shapiro’s translations of the nicknames, in order to demonstrate the importance of culture factors in translating.