Abstract

Communication among countries has been accepted by more and more people in the world as a determined tendency so that we can absorb the crystal of other race’s wisdom. Human beings are categorized and indentified on this planet, in a specific country, and in their own family. While interacting with other family members, we gradually developed different kinship nouns, such as mother, father and so on.

Different ways of kinship terms addressing in different situations can reflect change of emotions and attitudes of the person who conducts the conversation. Common cultural factors and history background may cause similarities in kinship addressing systems in various societies, while different society revolutionary paths may lead to sharp disparity in kinship terms. Each specific way of addressing kinship nouns represent a unique culture behind it. As a result of thousands years of feudal system and its history of patriarch system, Chinese people attach much more value to family hierarchy and to the difference among family member of different generations than other people do. Respect, politeness and proper manners are always emphasized in Chinese society. On the contrary, people in the western society tend to put the individuality of human beings on the top of the list. Actually, “independence”, “freedom” and “equality” are the core of their mainstream social value. As the carrier of culture and value, kinship addressing system can always reflect the difference between eastern and western society.

Therefore, inaccurate translation of kinship terms may give rise to misunderstandings of the context or even a society which can be avoided in the first place. To comply with this trend, this paper will employ translation theory as the foundation to study the factors that give rise to the difference between Chinese and western kinship addressing system and to figure out method of accurate translation.

Keywords: kinship, translation, cultural difference