Abstract

The phenomenon of cultural vacancy arises from the differences of history, customs, religion, ideology and other aspects between the east and the west, and it is also the natural barrier to communication of different languages. This paper mainly explores the phenomenon of cultural vacancy in C-E translation and studies its effective and flexible translation methods, which could be the helpful reference for translators and scholars.

Key words:  cultural difference   cultural vacancy   translation methods

摘要

中西方历史背景、社会习俗、宗教文化、意识形态等方面的差异造成了文化空缺现象,同时也形成了不同语言交流中难以逾越的天然屏障。本文着重探析汉英翻译中的文化空缺现象，通过成因分析，研究其灵活实用的翻译方法，旨在为该方向的翻译学习者提供有益的参考资料。

关键词: 文化差异；文化空缺；翻译方法

Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
As we all know, there are great differences existing in the different environments, histories, customs, thinking modes and other things in the world, which result in cultural differences. The characteristics of different nations are also the reasons for the appearance of cultural difference. With the development of international trade and intercultural communication, the phenomenon of cultural vacancy has been perceived gradually by people all over the world, which tend to be the natural barriers existing in the process of intercultural communication.
1.1.1 Studies Abroad
The first person who put forward a comprehensive definition of culture is E. B. Tylor who is the anthropologist of Britain, and he thinks “culture is a complex relative whole, which consists of knowledge, belief, art, law, morality, custom and other abilities and habits which are necessary for human to be socialized.”
Then many concepts of culture were put forward consecutively. 
Hull. Ail, American cultural anthropologist, found that the some nation's language does not have the vocabularies of color, which exist in most of the other languages, when he did research into original inhabitants in Australia. He used the “words’ vacancy”, “gap” in his research papers. A linguist employed the term “nonequivalent lexicon” while analyzing the research of lexicon of several different languages．In 1980s, Sorokin, Russian scholar proposed the theory of 'cultural vacancy' in his research paper about cultural peculiarities of diverse nations．