A Report On The English Translation Of Thai People's Marriage Customs

This is a Chinese-English translation report.The source text is selected from the Chinese work A Comprehensive Comparative Study of Zhuang and Thai Nationalities' Traditional Culture: Volume III,which is edited by Prof.Qin Shengmin.The original work is divided into three parts including 12 chapters.This is the third volume of the series and it introduces(1)the traditional architecture of Zhuang and Thai nationalities;(2)Zhuang and Thai nationalities' life habits and customs and(3)Zhuang and Thai nationalities' life etiquette and rites of passage.The source text of this translation is the Section Three,Chapter Two,Part Eight of this book.It is mainly about the marriage customs come from the ceremonies and rites in Thai culture.Surrounding the theme of “marriage customs”,this section introduces the marriage customs of young men and women's amorism and getting married and the elopement out of deep love.During translation,guided by Peter Newmark's text type theory,based on the text types and text features,by using the semantic translation and communicative translation approaches,the translator created a bilingual termbase with the use of computer-aided translation tools in the initial stage.“The marriage customs of Thai people” is a text with both information function and communicative function.Due to the differences in language and culture,the difficulties encountered in the translation mainly include the translation of(1)lots of culture-loaded words;(2)Thai folklore terms,namely,food names,tools,ceremonial activities,religious taboos slangs and proverbs;and(3)cultural vacancy among Thai and English.In this translation report,the translator not only gives an elaboration of the above difficulties,but also takes them as typical cases to study,so as to present the translation process.Through translation and case analysis,and the application of communicative translation and semantic translation,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)to ensure the readability of the translation while maximizing the preservation of Thai people's traditional cultural information in the target language,the translator should use the methods of literal translation,liberal translation,literal translation plus annotation,liberal translation plus annotation and transliteration plus annotation in culture-loaded words translation;(2)in the translation of text with both information function and communicative function,it is particularly important to normalize all the terminologies and create a standard bilingual termbase to do Thai folklore terms translation;(3)for the translation of the cultural vacancy content with strong ethnic and cultural identity,there is no complete equivalent expression in English,which requires special treatment in translation skills,namely,free translation,literal translation and annotation,to make readers understand the ethnic folk culture.