A Practical Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Introduction To Quanzhou Traditional Architectural Culture(Excerpt)

As the starting point of the ancient "Maritime Silk Road",Quanzhou enjoys the reputation of "world religious museum",and plays an important role in the cultural exchange between China and foreign countries.This translation practice has selected chapters 1 and 8 from Introduction to Quanzhou Traditional Architectural Culture written by senior architect Chen Kaifeng,who is the director of Research Office of Quanzhou Architectural Design Institute.These two chapters respectively elaborate the influence of religions on Quanzhou architecture and the general introduction to Quanzhou architectural culture,showing the main characteristics of Quanzhou traditional architecture.It is hoped that this translation practice can help to promote the culture of ancient Chinese architecture.The main problems encountered in this translation practice are on the lexical level.In this paper,the problems encountered in translation fall into the following four categories: English-Chinese translation of words with nonequivalent collocations,translation of words with negative transfer of the mother tongue,translation of words with semantic redundancy and absence,and translation of culture-loaded words.The following solutions are put forward to tackle these translation problems: transforming concrete into abstract and transforming abstract into concrete;linguistic context adaptation and cultural context adaptation;omitting unnecessary components and adding missing components;transliteration with annotation,paraphrasing translation and mutual substitution between superordinates and hyponyms.Hopefully,this paper can provide some guidance for future translation of similar texts.