Report On Translation Of Culture-loaded Expressions In Excerpt Of A History Of The Chinese Academies

As a cultural and educational organization for Chinese literati, academy has witnessed vicissitudes of more than one thousand years since Tang Dynasty. Up to now, academy has played an essential role in modern society and has become a common concern for people from all walks of life. Influenced by the regional culture of Hunan province and Yuelu academy, I have shown an increasing interest in ancient Chinese academy and its culture since six years ago. During the period, I deepened my knowledge of the Chinese academies' culture and culture-loaded expressions after reading through the book of A History of the Chinese Academies. Therefore, I chose the second chapter of the book as the objective of this translation practice in the hope that I can deepen my understanding of Chinese academies' culture, tell the differences between English and Chinese culture and expressions and thus give references to translation of parallel texts.In the translation practice, I adopted Eugene Nida's classification of culture and classified the culture-loaded expressions of the source text into four categories, namely, ecological, material, social and linguistic culture-loaded expressions. Furthermore, I adopted Appiah's thick translation theory, applied the translation strategy of foreignization and employed translation methods including addition, literal translation and transliteration with annotation to overcome the translation difficulties caused by uncertain, incomplete culture-loaded expressions as well as culture-loaded expressions with no English equivalent. From my perspective, when translating such academic monograph, the translator shall pay the same attention to both the formality and the heterogeneous cultural phenomenon of the source text. In other words, translators shall not be restricted to the original form of the source text and sometimes they are allowed to add annotations.Therefore, in this translation practice, several translation methods were employed in order to keep its original style and produce a better translation.