The Use Of Translator’s Background Knowledge In E-C Translation Of Sinological Works

As an American sinological work based on western academic concepts,Shifting Stories: History,Gossip,and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China makes diachronic inspection and study on the development of early novels in ancient China from the literary and cultural perspective of foreign countries.It combines a large number of historical facts and cultural stories of the Tang dynasty to probe the theme of novels in that period systematically and deeply,revealing evolution process of novels from the internal hearsay of the class of scholar-officials to socially accepted literary sketches.This work refers to a large number of historical and literary sources,covering a wide range of literary and cultural knowledge.It is highly academic,characterized with standard and abstract terms,complex sentences and obscure logic.Therefore,the translator’s skills of source language and literary and cultural background knowledge of target language are highly required.In the process of understanding original text,a large amount of historical,literary and cultural background knowledge of the Tang Dynasty needs to be learned to help translator understand the abstract terms and the logic of complex sentence in the original text;in the process of expressing translated text,it is necessary to skillfully use the historical,literary and cultural concepts of the Tang Dynasty to accurately convey the concepts of traditional Chinese culture and literature which are elaborated by the author in the original work with academic discourse from western academic standpoint and perspective.Specifically,in the translation process of this work,the necessary background knowledge system can be constructed through targeted learning.Then translator can take advantage of the background knowledge to "backward" understand the source text according to the strategy of co-reference of information and logic,and make full use of background knowledge to modify the expression of the translation in the light of strategy of comparison of knowledge and semantics.By using the resources in various forms and at different levels,such as conventional background knowledge,clues in Internet resources,the original novels of the Tang Dynasty and domestic academic research literatures of novels in the Tang Dynasty,translator can fully utilizes literary and cultural background knowledge of target language to effectively strengthen accurate comprehension of the source text and natural and standard expression in the translation.