C-E Translation Report On The Sketch Book:Chinese People(Excerpt)

The material of this translation report is excerpted from The Sketch Book: Chinese People which consists of more than 20 prose written by well-known Chinese writers and scholars.All articles in this book are diverse in style and plain in words with a large number of Chinese idiomatic phrases and vernacular words.The author chooses parts of the book for this translation practice and,after analyzing and summarizing the difficulties with specific examples,puts forward with corresponding solutions.Idiomatic phrases are ubiquitous in Chinese.Due to the differences in the usage and understanding of language between Chinese and Western people,there exist difficulties in translating Chinese idiomatic phrases into English.The difficulties in this project are mainly caused by metaphors,which lie in the following two aspects: 1)Difficulty in dealing with metaphorical images;2)Difficulty in conveying the connotative information under the metaphors.Nida's Reader Response Theory provides a theoretical basis for solving those difficulties.Translator shares the responsibility of introducing culture and educating readers,but it can never be made at the expense of reducing the reading fluency and readability and increasing the reading burden.According to this theory,to achieve the similar reading experience and near-equivalent reading effect as the source language reader,the author puts forward with the following tactics: 1)Maintaining metaphorical images by literal translation and substituting by similar metaphorical images;2)Omitting images to maintain the connotative meaning of the metaphors and annotating with footnotes.Those solutions are proved effective to cope with the translation difficulties of Chinese idiomatic phrases in this project.Meanwhile,the author also hopes that these methods can provide reference for other translators to solve such problems.