Translation Analysis Of Plant And Animal Terms In The English Versions Of Shi Ji And Han Shu

Since the ancient time, animals and plants have been an integral part of man’s daily life and labor. They meet the needs of human survival, and in the meanwhile, they also enrich our language and culture. Almost every literary work describes them. Terms of animals and plants designate animals and plants, but they also contain cultural connotations which are often difficult to transfer in the process of translation. The central issue of translation lies in achieving equivalence between the source language/culture and target language/culture. How to achieve the equivalent translation is one of the primary issues facing translators.As two of the most important Chinese classics, Shi Ji and Han Shu are regarded as encyclopedic historical records, because the two classics record not only famous historical figures, important events but also a large number of terms, including animal and plant terms. In the two classics, the animal and plant terms reveal the colorful cultural connotations. This study focuses on the translation of animal and plant terms in Shi Ji and Han Shu. The corpus of these terms is set up from four English versions, the English versions of Shi Ji, Records of the Grand Historian translated by Burton Watson and The Grand Scribe’s Records by William H. Nienhauser, Jr; the English versions of Han Shu, Courtier and Commoner in Ancient China:Selections from the History of the Former Han by Pan Ku by Burton Watson and The History of the Former Han Dynasty by Homer H. Dubs. This thesis analyzes the Chinese and English versions of animal and plant terms in the translations to examine what kind of translation strategies are adopted by the translators with an aim to find out translation strategies appropriate for translating animal and plant terms in Chinese classicsThe thesis combines quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis for research. According to their cultural attributes in the source texts, animal and plant terms are divided into common terms and culturally loaded terms. The latter one is divided further into terms with metaphorical meaning, terms derived from legends and terms unique to China. The study finds that translators adopt various translation strategies to render different kinds of animal and plant terms so that the language features of different versions have much diversity. Another finding in this study is that there are five kinds of equivalent types between SL and TL in the translations, i.e. full equivalence, partial equivalence, referential equivalence, cultural equivalence and nil equivalence. The result shows that differences in geography, culture and translation purpose and target readership result in non-equivalence between the source language and the target language.