A Report On E-C Translating Of Making Transcendents: Ascetics And Social Memory In Early Medieval China

This is an E-C translating report based on the translating practice of the academic research literature Making Transcendents:Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China(for short Making Transcendents)written by Robert Campany,an American sinologist.The source text,centering on the concept of “making transcendents” in Daoism,proposes the questions and principles which need to be focused on when interpreting the religious history narratives.Making Transcendents is an overseas academic research written by a sinologist.There are many culture-specific expressions,modal verbs and stance adverbs.The frequent uses of long and complex sentences,sentences of passive voice and parentheses are common in the source text.Besides,the author frequently adopts Latin words,a kind of old-fashioned word and models in brackets to supplement the extra information.These are features of the source text,which are also the points which the translator of this report attaches attention to when doing the translating practice.Based on the translating practice of the introduction and the first chapter of Making Transcendents and under the guidance of Nord’s translation theory of function plus loyalty,this report summarizes the difficulties and problems in this practice at the level of lexicon,syntax and text.This report includes four chapters.The first chapter is a task description which briefly introduces the background and significance of this task as well as the analysis of the source text.The second chapter mainly discusses the development of Nord’s function plus loyalty theory,the relationship between the loyalty principle and function principle and applications of this theory.The third chapter is the body of this report.Combining the source-text analysis with different functions like referential function,expressive function and appellative function expected to fulfill,in accordance with the requirement of the principle of “loyalty” that translators are supposed to respect the source-text author’s individual intentions,the translator presents a list of applicable and detailed translation methods which are adopted to deal with difficulties,for example,addition and back translation at the lexical level,division and voice conversion at the syntactic level and substitution and omission at the textual level.The final chapter summarizes the significance of function plus loyalty theory in translating overseas academic researches,and concludes limitations,reflections and experiences from the translating practice.Translating foreign academic researches on Daoism can encourage domestic scholars to know about overseas researches on Daoism.In addition,through this academic dialogue,the confidence and consciousness to conduct academic researches centering on this theme could be strengthened.Therefore,it is hopeful that the practice could offer some fresh ideas and perspectives to domestic scholars researching on Daoism.It is also hoped that this report could be used as a reference for the translation of similar texts.