A Translation Report On History Of Chinese Essays And Fictions (Chapter Eleven)

History of Chinese Essays and Fictions is a historical work on literary history.It is written by Professor Chen Pingyuan and respectively presents the development of Chinese essays in the chronological order and the development of Chinese fictions according to their types.It is a special historical work in the history of Chinese literature that breaks through the tradition of previous works on literary history,which used to introduce writers’ life stories and analyze or interpret their works,and focuses on the elaboration of literary genres’ evolution.The translator selected Chapter Eleven:Heroes in History:Folk Narration’s Influence on Novels of History of Chinese Essays and Fictions as the source text of the translation practice.The chapter mainly studies folk narration’s influence on the development of episodic novels in ancient times.The eleventh chapter is comprised of four sections.The first three sections respectively present folk narration’s influence on the completion of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,The Outlaws of the Marsh,and The Journey to the West and the fourth section explains the differences and connections between the knight-errant fictions and the case fictions.The process of argument involves a great deal of viewpoints on literary history.In accordance with the academic features of the source text,this translation practice aims to reproduce the academic viewpoints in the source text under the guidance of the Skopos theory.It is hoped that the translation can provide the accurate academic viewpoints on Chinese literary history for target readers,thus facilitating relevant research on the history of Chinese novels.The source text of the translation practice illustrates folk narration’s influence on the development of episodic novels,so it involves terms of literature and culture-loaded words.As for terms of literature,the translator mainly complied with the fidelity rule and applied the literal translation.With regard to culture-loaded words,the translator adopted the domestication strategy in the light of the coherence rule.When the translator made adjustments in the syntactic level,the coherence rule was more important for the translator than the fidelity rule.The translator changed the sentence structure and added cohesive devices or implied meaning when translating sentences in classical Chinese.Moreover,given that the features of English,such as subject prominence and frequent usage of nouns,the translator made the subject prominent and realized nominalization of verb structures for adapting to target readers’ expression habits.In terms of style,language style of the academic work is different from other academic works.For one thing,its language is precise and logical.For another,its language is vivid and figurative.For realizing reproduction of academic language style,literal translation was the main translation method under the direction of the fidelity rule.When presenting vivid language style in translation,the translator was inclined to choose decolouring to deal with Chinese idioms and rhetorical devices in the light of the fidelity rule.To sum up,the main three rules of the Skopos theory provided the translator with the effective guidance to solve the problems in the lexical level,syntactic level and style in the translation practice,assisted the translator in realizing the translation objective of conveying the perspectives on literary history accurately and provided practical and workable translation strategies,methods and techniques for the English translation of Chen Pingyuan’s academic works.