A Report On The Translation Of Life Among The Chinese (Chapter 9 And 11) And Journeys In North China (Chapter 15 And 16)

This report is a review on the translation of Chapter 9 and Chapter 11 of Life among the Chinese and Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 of Journeys in North China. These two books mainly describe what the missionaries saw and heard in China, and how to do the missionary work there.The part of author’s translation according to the sequence of the travel route in China, the missionaries took notes about local customs and practices, problems and appearances in Fuhchau, Chih-Li and Shan-Si, mainly talk about the foreign mission’s experience here. The texts mainly describe the scenery and depiction, usually forms of travel notes and dairy in lively language, using daily words, the feeling they wrote was objective and realistic, the descriptions were full of details. 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 introduces from four aspects:words equivalence, syntactical equivalence,textual equivalence and stylistic equivalence.Part4 section is the core of the report, focusing on the key points and difficult points. The author makes some classification and comparison. In the process of translation, the author considered that some words in the English text have the similar meaning with Chinese idioms and set phrases. After thinking carefully, according to Chinese reader’s reading habit, the author translated a great number of English words into Chinese idioms which are popular in our culture. In addition, as the English text was written by foreign missionaries, many difficult words are connected with religion and belief. The author conducted the translations under the macro guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence, using literal translation, free translation and other methods in translating. In addition, some other difficult word points such as names of people and places and things related with geographical knowledge are also analyzed. In the translation process, the author used various methods and skills to deal with the typical sentences, complex sentences, and combined the methods of transformation of passive voice, division, corresponding translation, literal translation, free translation and so on, trying best to reaching the English text in style and content. In the aspect of paragraph structure, there are some different ways between English and Chinese. In English, logic is given much attention and usually many conjunctions are used. In the paragraph translation, the author combined inversion and integrated approach to cater to Chinese readers.In the conclusion, the author makes a summary on the experience and deficiency of this translation, and put forwards some suggestions for future improvement, hoping the translation and the report are helpful for future studies on overseas sinology and the translation of missionary travel notes.