Report On English Translation Of Chapter Eleven (Part â…¡) In Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi

Today it is the great era when China has begun to merge into the world and had dialogue with peoples of all other countries. The greater reform and opening China has realized and the more frequently Chinese people communicate with foreign friends, the more urgent we feel to carry forward the Chinese culture to the outside world. Enhancing Chinese people’s cultural quality, pride, cohesion and patriotism also calls for our comprehensive and systematic study and dissemination of the splendid culture of China, including the traditional Chinese aesthetics. Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi(A Brief History of Chinese Aesthetic Culture) is a scholarly work for introducing the traditional Chinese aesthetics, and its English translation will be of significance to spreading the traditional Chinese aesthetics. Up to now it has not been rendered into English. Therefore, its English translation is both necessary and original.This project aims to explore the English translation of Chapter Eleven(Part II) of the book in Chinese, i.e. “Tremendous Momentum in the Heyday of the Tang Dynasty(2): Poetry”(in English). The part of the chapter introduces, in the backdrop of the ups and downs of the High Tang history, the famous poets and their poems in the period. The text style of this chapter is that of a humanistic and scholarly essay, which is abundant with cited poems, and historical and cultural terms. On the basis of her experiences of translating it, the translator writes her translation report, involving the background and significance of the project, the process of translating and analysis of difficulty rendering, the last part of which occupies a big space of the report, where she focuses on describing her attempt to keep a balance between content and form, documentariness and literariness, in rendering the poems cited in the original text.The translator’s basic English translation strategy is, on the one hand, to retain properly the value and belief system, theoretical form, frame of thought, and way of expression of the original text, and, on the other hand, to make sure that the English version 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 those poems cited in the original text, in comprehending those poems, the translator tries to reach a thorough and accurate understanding of the poems and their cultural connotation, especially their images and intended meaning in contexts, and in expressing this understanding, on the basis of giving priority to putting across the intended meaning of the Chinese original, she tries to keep a balance between content, form and style. Choosing appropriate translation methods flexibly according to the original rhymes, structures and cultural words, she applies transliteration, literal rendering, free rendering, foreignization, annotation, etc. If there are translations published by accomplished translators available for a poem, she tries to adopt them with necessary adaptation to the relevant contexts. On the word, sentence and textual levels, the translator, taking the text as a whole, strives to make sure that there is proper unification between content and form, documentariness and literariness, in her effort to produce a version of the original text which can meet the requirements for publication in English.