Literary translation is not merely the transformation of words, but it is a cross-cultural activity from cultural perspec-tive. The paper mainly explores the concept of cultural context and the relationship between cultural context and literary transla-tion, and analyzes explanatory function and restrictive function of cultural context in literary translation. If these functions can be involved in the literary translation, it is necessary for translators to resort to different translation strategies according to the dif-ferent target cultural context. The selection of translation strategies is never random, but constrained by the cultural context.