A Report On English Translation Of The General Theory Of Education(Excerpts)

Chinese history witnesses numerous educational thinkers with their great education thoughts from ancient times to the present.With the inspiration of “the Belt & Road” and “Cultural Confidence” national strategies,the proportion of Chinese-English translation works has increased significantly,but the translation of the educational work takes a low portion.To translate the works on the Chinese education will not only facilitate the spread of Chinese educational ideas,but also promote the national cultural exchanges.This thesis is a report on the English translation of The General Theory of Education by Shu Xincheng(1893-1960),a famous educationalist in early modern China,which does not yet have any English vision.The first chapter(The Content of Education),the fourth chapter(Education and Students)and the fifth chapter(Education and Teachers)of the book are selected for the translation practice.As the original text is an educational text dominated by functional information,the translation is done under the guidance of Hu Gengshen's theory of Translation as Adaption and Selection.That is,translators should make great efforts to adapt to the translation environment and flexibly choose translation strategies according to the original information in order to achieve adaptation and transformation in the three dimensions of language,culture and communication.In terms of vocabulary,this practice involves a large number of educational jargons,four-character phrases,and proper nouns.In order to eliminate the obstacles that the target language readers may encounter when reading,and help them to understand fully Chinese culture,we use free translation and transliteration plus annotation.As there are a lot of classical Chinese sentences about the educational thought in ancient China,the translation strategy of adaptation and free translation are applied to enhance readability and acceptability of the translation text.In addition,as quite a lot of long and difficult sentences of Chinese characteristics in the source text,so we use the method of amplification and recasting to enhance the logic of the translation and make the discourse more compact.This report tries to summarize the translation strategies and methods of educational texts under the guidance of the theory of translation as adaption and selection,aiming to give some enlightenment for the translation of similar texts.