| Chinese calligraphy is one of Chinese traditional artistic forms in China.The philosophical and aesthetic value of Chinese calligraphy have become an important part of Chinese cultural communication.With the intensification of cross cultural communication,the number of publications about Chinese calligraphy is on the rise,in the meantime,a large number of Chinese calligraphic exhibitions are held by foreign museums to attract people who want to know more about Chinese calligraphy.The museum commentary plays a vital role in conneeting two different cultures.The ultimate goal of commentary translation intends to share with the foreign visitors the relevant information about nature,culture,and customs.Translation of museum commentary creates a channel through which the foreign visitors have a glimpse of Chinese culture.Some calligraphic commentary translation,however,does not have the ideal effect on the visitors.The problems with the translation of calligraphic commentary have the inappropriate application of translation strategies and methods in dealing with the calligraphic terms,careless misspellings,frequent grammatical errors,improper omission of the important information,etc.These problems damage the acceptability of the museum and even cause misunderstanding among the foreign visitors.This thesis chooses "The Ancient Art of Writing",the calligraphy exhibition of the National Palace Museum of Taipei,as a case to conduct the translation study of museum commentary."The Ancient Art of Writing" is a long established exhibition and the findings of the thesis intends to give some reference for the translation of coumentary in other domestic museums.As of February 2017,the number of model calligraphy(fa shu法书)is 3672,and the number of calligraphic writing books(fa tie法帖)is 490.The National Palace Museum of Taipei holds regular calligraphic exhibition named "The Ancient Art of Writing" from 2005,and this collection also draws a lot of attention from foreign people who enjoy Chinese calligraphy.The study is mainly for giving implication for calligraphic commentary translation,but also points out the room for improvement in "the Ancient Art of Writing".This thesis attempts to make a preliminary research into the commentary translation of"The Ancient Art of Writing".A total of 27 English and Chinese commentaries were collected from the official website of the National Palace Museum of Taipei.And the time span is July 2005 to July 2016.The English and Chinese commentary corpora for "The Ancient Art of Writing" are built after text processing.Corpora are used in the high-frequent aesthetic terms extraction.Qualitative and quantitative methods are combined to carry out the study.The componential analysis shows that the high-frequent aesthetic terms in the same semantic field such as qiu jin cang jin(苍劲)and so on have some subtle differences in aesthetic meaning.The analysis shows that the commentary translation of the National Palace Museum of Taipei is relatively professional and good for foreign visitors comprehend the Chinese calligraphy.The translator should consider the communicative intention and information intention when they translate the calligraphic commentary.More messages can be inferred from adding enough appropriate ostensive information.The translator can choose keywords which are generally accepted and have enough calligraphic aesthetic meaning.After commentary comparison,the stylistic feature of calligrapher is settled and unique,and translation of the foreign museum is puristic and coincides with the rule of processing effort.By the contrast of the foreign museum commentary,the translation can absorb advantages of foreign museum commentary.The translation by the National Palace Museum of Taipei makes the basic calligraphic meaning clear to the English-speaking visitors,but the omission of calligraphic annotation needs be fully translated,and thus there is still some room for improvement in terms of the translation of calligraphic commentary. |
