Strategies For Translating Chinese Art Exhibition Texts Into English

With the rapid social development,people’s material well-being is improved tremendously.They begin to seek ways to enrich their spiritual life.As the places with the easiest access to exposure of art and culture,museums are becoming more and more popular for not only the scholars but also for anyone wishes to appreciate art,to learn something or just like to immerse themselves in the atmosphere.Therefore,the exhibition texts are crucial for all the visitors to understand and appreciate the artworks.As the museum are open for everyone,including those who lacks a Chinese culture background,so there are two versions of texts,the Chinese version and the English version.The quality of the translation shall be taken seriously,as those read the English texts might be unfamiliar with the Chinese culture or they are but try to learn some English or gain some perspectives.Based on a case study of the author’s experience in translating the Chinese exhibition texts of the very first Cheng Shifa Art Museum exhibition.In this thesis,firstly the background of the translation project in question is provided and stylistic features of the texts are reviewed.Secondly,the author summarizes the difficulties encountered during the translation process,including visitors’ different culture background,complicated forms of expression in the original texts,and the Chinese parataxis more featured in the art texts making the texts lacking in logic,thus more difficult to understand and translate.Then,the author proposes accordingly three general translation strategies: adjust the information contained in the sentences considering the visitors’ culture background;simplifying the modifiers in the texts;and revealing the implicit logic according to context.The author hopes that the discussion in this thesis will provide some useful ideas or inspiration for other translators working on similar texts,and for future studies on this top.