A Report On Translation Of The Excerpts From Zhongguo Minsu

This thesis is a Chinese-English translation report.The source text is Zhongguo Minsu(Chinese Folk Customs),which records the Chinese culture of food,clothing,traditional architecture,wedding ceremony,belief and taboo and many other aspects.In order to provide foreign readers with an approach to the unique charm of Chinese traditional culture,the author of the report translated the first chapter of the book “Food Customs” into English,and selected skopos theory as the guiding theory for the translation.This thesis firstly presents the research background and significance;then it describes the translation process including translation preparation before translation,representation during translation and proofreading after translation.Next,it summarizes the difficulties from the perspective of vocabulary and sentences in the translation process and analyzes their corresponding translation methods based on the three rules of skopos theory: skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule.In general,in translating the majority of culture-loaded terms,the author uses transliteration plus annotation and literal translation plus annotation;when dealing with some culture-loaded words with redundant information and Chinese four-character expressions with repetitive meaning,the author adopts omission;in translating those cited poetic lines with overlapping or irrelevant information,the author chooses deletion to ensure the fluency of the target text(TT);as for the translation of parallel sentences,the author uses conversion of part-of-speech to avoid repetition;in translating zero-subject sentences,the author selects conversion of voice or addition of subjects to make the sentences of TT complete;as for the translation of run-on sentences,the author adopts reconstruction to change the structure or addition to supplement connectives to improve the readability of TT.The author finds that the translation of folk culture texts should try to fully convey the original information and at the same time avoid misunderstanding to the target readers;it should also take into account the differences between Chinese and English while preserving the aesthetic effects of the source texts.Only in this way can the purpose of cultural transmission be really achieved.Therefore,translators should properly handle the relationship between fidelity and readability of cultural translation works.