Report On English Translation Of The Eighth Chapter Of Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi

In disseminating Chinese culture to the outside world for strengthening China’scultural soft power, translation from Chinese into English plays an important role. Ofthe traditional Chinese culture, which is profound with a long history, the traditionalChinese aesthetic culture makes its most splendid part, and its English translation is ofmuch significance to China’s cultural exchanges with other cultures. The scholarlyChinese book Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi explains chronologically the mostaesthetically valuable cultural resources of all dynasties in Chinese history in amulti-tiered and multi-dimensional way with vivid illustrations, authentic descriptionsand detailed commentaries, which taps the essence of traditional Chinese aestheticculture and summarizes its long and productive history. There has been no translatedversion in English of the book available, and therefore, the translation and its relatedanalysis will be necessary, significant and original.This project aims to explore the English translation of “‘Touching the Soul’ in theEastern Jin and the Southern Dynasties”, the eighth chapter of the book ZhongguoShenmei Wenhua Janshi. The chapter introduces the aesthetic cultural history in the EastJin and the Southern Dynasties with regard to poetry, painting and calligraphy. The textof the chapter, which is humanistic and scholarly in an essay style, is abundant withcitations and cultural-loaded terms. On the basis of the experiences of translating it, thetranslator writes her work report, involving the background and significance of theproject, the process of translating, and difficult rendering analysis. For the last part,which occupies a big part of the report, she focuses on her analysis of how to rendercultural-loaded terms.The translator’s basic English translation strategy is, on the one hand, to retainproperly the value and belief system, theoretical form, frame of thought, and way ofexpression of the original text, and, on the other hand, to make sure that the Englishversion presents features of the English academic prose so that it can be accurately accepted by the target readership. With regard to her methods of translating thosecultural-loaded terms of the chapter, in comprehending those terms, the translator triesto reach a thorough and accurate understanding of the cultural connotation of each termand its intended meaning in its context, and in expressing this understanding, on thebasis of giving priority to putting across the intended meaning of the Chinese original,she lays emphasis on opting for appropriate English language expressions. And takinginto account the specific context and translation purpose, she applies proper translatingmethods such as transliteration, literal rendering, free rendering, foreignization,annotation, etc. For some cultural terms, if there are established translations, she tried toadopt them. On the textual level, the translator takes all the cultural terms in the Chinesetext as a whole, making sure that they are rendered in a consistent way.