A Report On C-E Translation Of Stories From The Three-Word Primer (Excerpts)

In recent years,China has actively promoted Chinese culture to the world and explored different ways for Chinese culture to go out.As the carrier of Chinese culture,cultural classics are of great significance to the dissemination of Chinese civilization and can help enhance Chinese cultural soft power.Therefore,the translation of Chinese cultural classics is not only an important way to carry forward national culture and facilitate Chinese-Western cultural exchanges,but also a bounden responsibility of translators.This report is based on the Chinese-English translation of 11 stories from the book Stories from the Three-Word Primer.This book contains a total of 50 stories,involving many classic stories with philosophical wisdom in The Three-Word Primer.In the process of translation,the translator encountered many difficulties,including the translation of idioms,allusions,words with implied meanings and run-on sentences.Guided by Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory,the translator summed up some translation methods to deal with these translation problems,and provided corresponding examples from lexical,syntactic and textual levels.On the lexical level,the translator applied literal translation,free translation,annotation,and amplification to reproduce cultural connotations of the source text to achieve functional equivalence;on the syntactic level,the translator employed the translation methods of synchronizing,reversing and splitting to make the translated text follow the syntax rules of the target language with an aim to reproduce a closest natural equivalent;on the textual level,the translator adopted different cohesive devices like reference and adding conjunctions to solve the problems of cohesion and coherence in translation.In this way,functional equivalence could be achieved.Through this translation practice,the translator hopes that this translation could do good to enrich the study of the translation of Chinese traditional cultural works,and to provide some translation experience of such kind for other translators.