A Project Report On The Translation Of The Comparison Between Chinese And Western Cultures:a Lecture Series (Excerpt)

This is a translation project report of the book entitled The Comparison between Chinese and Western Cultures:A Lecture Series edited by Gao Xudong. This book talks about a systematic and comprehensive topic—the comparative study between Chinese and western cultures and literature. The excerpts of this report are the preface as well as Lecture 1 and Lecture 2 in the first chapter. The source text mainly concerns ethics-based Chinese culture and religion-based western culture as well as the comparison between Confucian and Christian ethics. This translation project aims to seek a corresponding point of the cultural dialogue between China and the western countries, thus promoting the intensive study of comparative literature. Therefore, this report is written in order to make some contribution to the cultural exchange between China and western countries.The main point of translation project is how to grasp the source text and let the target language readers understand what is implied in the source text. Problems in this translation process lie in the translation of some idioms and long sentences. Before conducting this translation project, I have looked up some relevant books and online resources, thus having a good mastery of the background knowledge. Nida’s Functional Equivalence theory is chosen as the guidance on the translation work.The main contents of this report are divided into four parts:Part One introduces the background of the translation project, including project resource, the importance of the project and the structure of the report. Part Two represents the source text on the whole, including the author, edition and the main context. Part Three is about the quality control of the translation, including translation difficulties, the selection and the description of translation theory and the method, the use of the theory and the method, the solving of the problems. Part Four is a conclusion of lessons from the translation and problems to be solved in the future. Among these four parts, Part Three is the key part.