A Report On The Translation Of The Oxford Encyclopedia Of African Thoughts(Political And Ideological Movements)

With deeper interactions between China and Africa,translating works related to Africa is of great importance to Sino-African communication in culture.The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought is an informative text with more than 360 entries and subentries,covering a wide range of topics,including philosophy,politics,art,music,literature,archaeology,linguistics,ethnology,anthropology and popular culture.This book introduces important figures,historical events and development of thoughts in the history of African thoughts.The translator chooses four important movements from the book.This report aims to discuss the difficulties and problems in the translation of informative text and find proper strategies and skills to solve them.At the beginning,the background,original text,text type and its characteristics,current situation and purpose of the study are introduced.Then the procedures of translation are illustrated.The translator adopts inductive method,literature analysis method and case analysis method to analyze the cases selected from the translation to discuss the difficulties and problems,and then proposes certain translation strategies and skills.The translator starts with the translation principles “xin”(faithfulness)and“da”(expressiveness),and conducts a case study from the angle of vocabulary and sentence,and then analyzes the translation skills such as lexical conversion,long sentence processing and word order adjustment,so as to make the translated version accurate and coherent,which conforms to the purpose of translating informative texts.Through the translation practice,considering the purpose of the translation of informative texts,the translator believes that the fidelity and coherency should be highlighted,while the form equity is not necessary.Lexical conversion and word accuracy should be adopted to obey the principle of “xin”(faithfulness).The translator can also turn a passive sentence into an active one,and divide and rearrange long sentences,so as to obey the principle of “da”(expressiveness).It is hoped that this report not only transmits African thoughts,but also provides some references for the future translation of informative texts.