A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Art Of The West In The Middle Ages (Chapter 2)

The report takes the Chinese translation of Henri Focillon’s academic work The Art of the West in the Middle Ages(Chap.2 Vol.I)as an example,and discusses in detail the difficulties encountered by the translator during the translation and the translation strategies used.Currently,there is no Chinese translation of the original text.The Art of the West in the Middle Ages(Chap.2 Vol.I)briefly introduces Romanesque architecture and the structure and style of Romanesque churches in different periods.The source text is research-based,featured by formalness and preciseness.Meanwhile,it contains lots of art-relevant abstract expressions.Under the guidance of relevance theory,the translator endeavors to achieve the optimal relevance between the source text and the target text in the process of translation so that the target readers’ attempt at comprehension can yield adequate contextual effects through minimal processing cost.This practice report involves five parts: introduction to the translation task,process description,theoretical overview,case study and conclusion.The chapter of case study is discussed from three levels: lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.Lexically,the difficulties include the abstract words of the source text and the words with the background of architectural art,and the translator chooses the translation methods of amplification,annotation and conversion accordingly.Syntactically,the translator applies the strategies of division,reformation and order adjustment to mainly address the difficulties of complex long and difficult sentences.Textually,the translator achieves intertextuality by repeating reference elements and adding conjunctions to realize contextual coherence at the textual level so as to ensure the fluency of the whole text.Finally,the experience gained from translation practice is pointed out by summarizing the practice guided by the relevance theory.The author hopes that this report will provide a feasible method for other translators to translate similar texts.