Report On English Translation Of Chapter Thirteen In Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi

Translation from Chinese to English plays an important role in the process of spreading Chinese culture to the world for enhancing China's soft power. Traditional Chinese culture, broad and profound, boasts a long history, and its English translation is of great significance for China's cultural exchanges with other cultures. The traditional aesthetic culture is one of the most brilliant parts of traditional Chinese culture. The scholarly Chinese book Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi(A Short History of Chinese Aesthetic Culture) explains chronologically the most aesthetically valuable cultural resources of all dynasties in Chinese history in a multi-tiered and multi-dimensional way with vivid illustrations, authentic descriptions and detailed commentaries, which taps the essence of traditional Chinese aesthetic culture and summarizes its long and productive history. There has been no translated version in English of the book in publication, and therefore, the translation and its related analysis will be necessary, significant and original, which will be positive to China's drive for dissemination of her traditional Chinese culture to the outside world.The translation project aims to explore the English translation of “Chanmian Fei'ce De Wantang Yunwei”(Emotional and Sentimental Charm in Late Tang Dynasty), Chapter Thirteen in Chinese book Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi. The chapter mainly introduces the Chinese aesthetic culture in late Tang Dynasty concerning mainly painting and poetry. Based on the practice of translating it, the translator writes her work report, including the background and significance of the project, the analysis of the original text, the process of translation, and the analysis of rendering the difficult point. There are some differences between Chinese and English in their thinking modes, which cause considerable differences in textual construction between the two languages. She devotes much to illustration and analysis of her construction of the English version of the Chinese text, involving some translational treatments on the word, sentence, and text levels, as well as the English rendering of those cited literary materials.What the translator pursues in her translation 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 acceptable to the target readership. In practice, she conducts a comprehensive application of the strategies of domestication and foreignization, and tries her best to render the thought and literariness in a balanced way. Concerning the translation of words, the translator adopts various methods such as literal translation, free translation, transliteration, and annotation, etc. On the sentence level, the translator takes the syntactic approach to the transformation between Chinese and English sentences as the dominant way. With regard to the methods of the textual construction of the English version, the translator tries to focus on using various connectives such as logical connectives, grammatical connectives, and lexical connectives to achieve the cohesion and coherence of the English text. In rendering those literary quotations, she either adopts existent translations or translates by herself in a flexible way yet conveying accurately the original purpose. All such operations aim at effective inter-cultural communication and promotion of the dissemination of traditional Chinese aesthetic culture to the outside world.