The Translation Of Chinese Paleographic Materials

This is a report on the translation of the preface and the first chapter of Guwenzixue Jianlun古文字学简论(A Brief Discussion on Chinese Paleography)by Professor Lin Yun 林坛 published by Zhonghua Book Company 中华书局 in Beijing in 2012.In Guwenzixue Jianlun,Prof.Lin discussed the way Chinese characters record language,the history and the norm of the evolving of Chinese characters,and explained the methods of paleographic studies.It is not easy to translate text of this kind.In this translation,another academic book on Chinese paleography,Wenzixue Gaiyao文字学概要(The Essentials of Grammatology)by Profesoor Qiu Xigui 裘锡圭,and its English translation by Gilbert Louis Mattos and Jerry Norman,are of great help as parallel texts.This report includes introduction to the origin of this translation task,a description of the translation processes,and an analysis of the translation from the perspectives of words and characters,sentences and paragraphs.Words and characters discussed here are paleographic terms,proper names of implements and book titles are discussed in detail.For a paleographic term that appeared many times in the source text,the translation at its first appearance consists of three parts:its pinyin transcription,its Chinese characters and its meaning.At later appearances,it is referred to with its pinyin or its meaning,whichever is convenient.For proper names of implements,a best practice is to transcribe the part of the name that has no practical meaning and to translate the other part with practical meaning.Most book titles are transcribed in pinyin without annotation or explanation,most likely to avoid a chunky translated title.Yet it would be better if some brief explanations were added.As for sentences,where some information key to the understanding of the text is omitted by the author for his assumption that the omitted information is well known to Chinese readers,the information is added in translation because what Chinese readers take for granted may well be alien to English readers.For sentences that are challenging to understand at first reading because of undefined phrases in the sentence or because of inexplicit underlying logic,its meaning is made clear by spelling out the exact meaning of the phrases or by making the underlying logic explicit.Sentences whose length is likely to lead to a chunky translation are divided.After the division,some adjustments are made about phrases and the sequence of sub-sentences to enhance cohesion.For sentences whose sub-sentences repeat each other,the sub-sentences are combined and their meaning jointly translated.From the perspective of paragraphs,the sequence of sentences in some paragraphs is altered to ensure cohesion,and to conform to the conventions of English writing.In some paragraphs,the relations among sentences are not clear enough for lack of indicators of the logic chain or indicators of the general structure of the paragraph.In this case,logic indicators are added to shed light on the relations among sentences in the paragraph.In other paragraphs,similar to the case of some sentences,some key information,or background knowledge is left out because the author assumes his readership is familiar with the information.In this case the left out background knowledge is added in translation to enable English readers a relatively smooth reading experience and a better understanding.Since there is not many practice or discussion on the translation of Chinese paleographic materials,the translation of Guwenzixue Jianlun and this report may provid new materials for later studies.And the discussions in this report about the translation of Guwenzixue Jianlu may be helpful for other translators,especially when translating such culturally loaded materials.If this translation and this report would interest one or two readers in ancient Chinese characters,that would be great.