A Report On The E-C Translation Of By The City Of The Long Sand(Chapter 11-17)

This report with By the City of the Long Sand-A Tale of New China as its translation material was conducted from the perspective of back translation.The source text was published by McClellan Company in New York in 1926 and written by Alice Tisdale Hobart,who is an American born female author.The translator chose Chapter 11-Chapter17 of the original text to carry out the E-C translation practice.This memoir described the author’s life when she was in Changsha with her husband who was the manager of Mobil Ocean Bank’s office in Changsha.By the City of the Long Sand portrayed the beautiful scenery,customs and culture of Changsha with exquisite details,which was created in non-native language."Back Translation" was first put forward,which refers to the process of retranslating other people’s foreign texts to the original text(Wang Zhengliang 2007: 20).Then Textless Back Translation developed from the theory."textless back translation" refers to the back translation where there is no original text or parallel text,but there is a cultural root(here refers to Chinese culture,instead of human culture).By the City of the Long Sand was written in English about Chinese culture and customs.Thus this E-C translation practice is actually a process of back translating without original text to refer to,which conforms to the definition of textless back-translation.This paper attempts to analyze the source text from nouns and cultural concept words with the aim of exploring the steps and difficulties of textless back-translation and the importance oftextless back-translation in the English-Chinese translation.There are five chapters in this report in total.Chapter one explains the description of the translation task.It mainly includes a brief introduction of the author Hobart and the background information of the original text as well as the purpose of the translation practice.Chapter two amplifies the process of translation.This mainly includes preparation before translation,translation process and proofreading after translation.During this part,a lot of research needs to be done,which is quite time-consuming.Chapter three is the key part of this thesis,which is the theory foundation of this report.This chapter mainly introduces the concept of back translation and its previous studies as well as the definition of textless back-translation.Chapter four is about case analysis.This chapter mainly analyses the original text from two aspects: the back translation of addressing terms and the back translation of cultural concept words,exploring the steps and difficulties of back translation and hoping to contribute to the improvement of the textless back translation theory and the dissemination of Chinese culture.Then comes the summary of this translation practice.Textless back translation is a good choice when composing this thesis.It mainly concludes the difficulties and key points of this translation practice,trying to contribute to the development of the textless back translation theory.