A Report On Chinese Translation On The Excerpts Of China:the Long-lived Empire

This translation practice report is based on the chapters from 20 to 24 of the book China:The Long-Lived Empire, written by Elisa Ruhamah Scidmore. It mainly includes the introduction of the translation text, the presentation of the translation theory used in the translation and the analysis of the difficult translation cases.China:The Long-Lived Empire, one of travel notes collected in the Proceedings of Foreign Language Old Books on China study, mainly describes what the foreigners see and hear during their traveling. Thus it is difficult to translate some names of people and places and some long sentences. What’s more, some obscure expressions in the text, the conflicts and thinking differences between the Chinese and westerners presented in the text also are the difficulties in the process of translation.Another translation difficulty is how to use the proper Chinese to express the deep meaning of some sentences which consist of old-fashioned English words. In order to keep the expression way of the original text and guarantee the accuracy and fluency of the translation so that the Chinese readers can have the same understanding and feeling with the western readers, the author uses the functional equivalency theory of Nida to deal with the difficult parts such as the words with cultural characteristics and other obscure expressions. Under the instruction of the theory, the author also uses some explicit translation methods like literal translation, liberal translation, and literal translation with annotation to faithfully and smoothly present the translation to make sure the readers have a better understanding of the original text.In the process of translation, the author has had a deeper understanding of the functional equivalency theory and learned something new about the translation work. Meanwhile the author has realized that it is very necessary to expand the scope of knowledge and improve the ability of translation. In the last part of the report, the author makes a summary of the translation practice and proposes the problems unsolved in the translation.