Report On The Translation Of Chinese Culturology (Chapter19-20)

This report is a review on the translation of Chapter 19 and 20, an important part of Chinese Culturology, written by Qin Deqing, published in 2015. The theoretical perspective of the book covers the overall layout of China’s 56-nationality culture, pointing out the direction of the theory construction and further development of traditional sinology research.The part of author’s translation mainly narrates life culture, aesthetic psychology and cultural ideal of the Chinese people, including each part of the Chinese national culture. That is, the life styles and customs like costume, diet, resident and transportation; spiritual culture, aesthetic psychology and cultural ideal. In view of the language features and translation difficulties, the author takes Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory as guiding principle for this translation practice. The report is introduced from four aspects:words equivalence, syntactical equivalence, textual equivalence and stylistic equivalence.In "case analysis", the core of the report, the author analyzes and classifies the difficulties mentioned above, combining with translation process and thinking, and finally gets solution. The original text contains a lot of proper nouns of national culture and culture-loaded words. To keep the Chinese historical and cultural elements, meanwhile, to let the foreign readers to understand the original meaning better, the author, under the macro guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory, combines literal translation, free translation and various translation methods for translation. Both the original text and translation are reproduced the original styles in native English. For some culture-loaded words, the author, on the basis of fully understanding the original meaning, adopts equivalence method for translation, making it easier for readers to accept. In the conclusion, the author makes a summary on the experience and inadequacy of this translation practice, and suggestions for future improvement.On the macro guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory, this translation report also takes various translation methods, to accumulate experience and lessons, exercise translation practice ability, and transfer information faithfully for foreign readers. the author hopes this translation and report are helpful for future studies on China’s cultural translation practice.