A Chinese-English Translation Report On Masters

The material of this translation report is selected from the book《先生》Masters,which is based on the ten large-scale documentary film “Master” by Shenzhen Yue Zhong Film and Television Company,and combines the feature articles of "New Weekly" to focus on ten Masters.The book is to introduce and memorize the influential figures in Chinese education of the past 100 years.Their character,temperament,fate,academic activities,as well as their wisdom,kindness,helplessness,anxiety,and joy are vividly portrayed.They turned suffering into lightening torch and used their backs to prove the positive side of the nation,through which they set a mirror for Chinese education today.Since 2012,the book has been printed for dozens of times,inspiring countless educators and students.But the English version is not yet available.After translating the book of more than 220,000 words,the author focused on selecting and extracting more than 10,000 words of the two Masters from the ten for intensive translation and summary,which is the basis of this practice report.This report adopted Vermeer’s Skopos theory,Neubert and Sherve’s Translation as Text,and Plural Complementarism of Translation Standard proposed by Professor Gu Zhengkun as the theoretical framework.A variety of translation methods are carefully taken to finish the translation practice of this book.Challenges in the process are classified into two main categories,those at the lexical level and those at the syntactic level.Difficulties at the lexical level are reflected in the translation of lengthy vocabulary,vocabulary with era characteristics,and culture-loaded words(classical Chinese,style name and pseudonym,generation name,official titles,address,literary allusions).Difficult issues at the syntactic level are mainly about the translation of long sentences with Chinese characteristics and sentences with redundant information.In the process of translation,the translation methods and strategies adopted include Domestication,Foreignization,Addition translation,Adaptation,Annotation,Transliteration,Multi-strategy,Edited translation,and Condensed translation.Case analysis is conducted respectively.Finally,the conclusion is reached: while translating this book,in which classic Chinese and vernacular coexist,the old and new cultures combined,the German Functional Skopos Theory,Plural Complementarism of Translation Standard,and Translation as Text can serve as the guidance,under which Domestication,Foreignization,Addition translation,Adaptation,Annotation,Transliteration,Multi-strategy can solve the difficulty of at the lexical,while Edited translation,and Condensed translation can be used to deal with the difficulty of translation at the syntactic level.