A Report Of The Translation Of The Gentlemen's Book Of Etiquette And Manual Of Politeness (Introduction,Chapter 1,Chapter 5,Chapter 7,Chapter 8,Chapter 9and Chapter 11)

This report is based on an English-Chinese translation of The Gentlemen's Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness,a masterwork of Cecil B.Hartley.The task excerpts Introduction,Chapter 1,Chapter 5,Chapter 7,Chapter 8,Chapter 9 and Chapter 11 of the book for translation.The source text is more than 32,000 words and rendered into about 62,000 Chinese characters.Introduction to the book tells about how vital the observation of etiquette rules was for a gentleman in the 1860 s.The rest chapters explain in detail what gentlemen should and should not do in varied social occasions such as in conversations,visits,and the like.The book that is defined as an expository text has substantial contents and enjoyed great popularity in America in the mid-19 th century.However,very few Chinese readers can access to the book for its formal Chinese version is not available so far.On account of both similarities and differences between Chinese and English,several popular course-books for English-Chinese translation were perused and then ten kinds of commonly-used translation skills were summarized and employed in this task,i.e.diction,conversion,amplification,repetition,condensation,division,shift of perspective,skills with negative structures,skills with adverbial clauses and skills with English set phrases respectively.Forty examples are cited in this report to illustrate in detail how those skills can be used to handle the most general translation problems.After the appropriate application of the ten commonly-used skills to translation,the task was much finished to a good effect.Nevertheless,due to the different textual organization rules between Chinese and English,some idiosyncratic linguistic phenomena were still found in this task and failed to be tackled by those commonly-used translation skills.For instance,in a long and complicated English topic chain,the base form of the topic as well as its relevant pronouns appeared with high frequency in each clause as their corresponding subjects or objects so as to maintain the topic continuity among the whole topic chain.A word-for-word Chinese translation of such a sentence must bear some redundancy and bizarreness.Now that the particular problems cannot be solved by those commonly-used skills,the topic chain theory of cognitive linguistics proves to be useful as a supplementary tool to overcome such difficulties.In light of the theory,in an English topic chain which is mainly featured by hypotaxis,the topic is often projected onto other clauses to function as their respective subjects or objects in the form of the original topic or pronouns.However,a Chinese topic chain which is principally characterized by parataxis adopts both zero anaphors and some reflexive pronouns more frequently as the form of projection of the topic to the clauses,which will make the sentence more concise,fluent and in line with Chinese grammar.In view of such differences,the theory is especially suitable for coping with the English-Chinese translation of complex and prolix sentences.Based on such a theory,in the translation of relevant peculiar language structures in this task,the repeated base forms and relevant pronouns of the topic in an English topic chain must be replaced by both zero anaphors and some reflexive pronouns in translation,which enables the target text to be more succinct,fluent and in accordance with Chinese linguistic conventions.This report consists of five chapters.The first chapter is a general description of the task,including a brief introduction to the task,the author and the source text respectively,the motivation for the task as well as the structure of the report.Chapter Two describes the whole translation process.The next chapter mainly elaborates on various case analyses with ten kinds of commonly-used translation techniques used for different problems.Chapter Four introduces the topic chain theory as a supplementary translation tool and explains how this theory was utilized to handle the idiosyncratic problems encountered in translation with ten detailed case analyses.The last chapter serves as a conclusion of the whole translation project,summarizing the achievements,implications and limitations from this task as well as several suggestions for future translation practice respectively.