A Report On Translating The Meandering Jinjiang River:The History Of The Bashu Culture(Excerpt) Guided By Hermeneutic Motion Theory

This is a report on translating The Meandering Jinjiang River: The History of the Bashu Culture(excerpt).The Meandering Jinjiang River: The History of the Bashu Culture is written by Duan Yu and Tan Luofei.This book is mainly about the development of the Bashu culture.The translator selects Section Four from Chapter Three as the source text,which introduces the new development of handicraft industry in Bashu and the formation of Chengdu as the Southwest International Metropolis.By reading the source text deeply,the translator finds that there are many culture-loaded words about the Bashu culture which are filled with rich connotation and extensive knowledge.It’s a great challenge for the translator.Thus,the main difficulty of this translation practice is to translate culture-loaded words of the Bashu culture.In order to reach the information balance between the source text and the target text,solve translation difficulties and improve the quality of the target text,the translator chooses George Steiner’s hermeneutic motion theory to guide her translation practice.In the book of After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation,George Steiner expresses that the translation process includes four steps,which are in order as trust,aggression,incorporation to compensation(Steiner,313).In this translation practice,the translator believes that the translation of the source text is going to contribute to the inheritance and promotion of the Bashu culture,which is the "trust" of the translator."Aggression" is seen as the interpretation of the content and essence of the source text."Incorporation" means that the translator converts the source text into the target text based on a deep understanding of the source text for the purpose of expressing the meaning and form of the source text.After "aggression" and "incorporation",the information in the source text is out of balance,and the translator takes appropriate translation methods to balance the differences between the source text of these culture-loaded words and their translation in order to produce the original information as completely as possible and improve the quality of the translation.Case analysis is used to study and analyze this translation practice,and the translator has found that Steiner’s theory on four-step translation process is useful to guide the translation of culture-loaded words.The application of this theory can eliminate certain cultural barriers and make the translation more fluent.In this report,the translation and discussion of culture-loaded words in the Bashu culture from the perspective of hermeneutics is conducive to further promoting the study of the translation of the Bashu culture,which is also helpful to the spread of the Bashu culture and promoting Chinese culture to go global.