A Report On Textless Back Translation Of Beautiful Su(Chapter 10) From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation Theory

Culture,an essential part in national soft power,undoubtedly plays an important role in international competitions.Also,the harmonious coexistence of different regional cultures acts as an inexhaustible impetus for the development of Chinese culture.The text translated here is extracted from Chapter 10,Beautiful Su(hereinafter abbreviated as Chapter 10),which narrates the changes of Suzhou in economic growth and cultural life since 1976.Because Wu Culture is portrayed vividly by Suzhou,a place with a history of more than 2500 years,studies on the city’s economy and culture are of great value.In the context of the policy that Chinese culture goes global,a good Suzhou story is a terrific element for Chinese stories.Different from traditional historical data or cultural chorography,this book was written by Stephen L.Koss,a U.S.author.The book’s introduction to the city is specific,involving almost all the aspects.The book is characterized by a flexible linguistic style,plain in general.But for some paragraphs describing scenery and objects,the author mainly adopts literary writing technique with some long complicated sentences occasionally.Based on the theory of communicative translation raised by Newmark,this thesis will conclude some common strategies for textless back translation through the analysis of some model sentences.This report includes six chapters.Chapter 1 is the description of the translation task,involving the text analysis,the significance of the translation practice and the structure of this report.Chapter 2 describes the translation course from three stages,pre-translation,while-translation and post-translation.Chapter 3 is the theoretical framework,illustrating the theoretical development and core views of communicative translation and textless back translation.As the most essential part,the fourth chapter picks some model sentences as well as the translated text to explain the guidance of communicative translation theory and to introduce some two strategies of textless back translation.Finally,Chapter 5 makes a summary of the significances and drawbacks of this study.To account for how communicative translation theory works in practice,this thesis makes analysis from lexical,syntactical and textual levels.Besides,as the text was written by a foreigner in a non-native language without an original Chinese transcript,the translation process should be defined as Textless Back Translation.In this thesis,four-character structure and cultural reconstruction,two strategies for back translation are discussed through model sentences.It is worth mentioning that due to the existence of cultural differences,misunderstandings on people’s names,geographical names and historical events are inevitable.When doing the translation,I will deeply look into the authenticity of the historical facts provided by the author.The author’s misunderstandings will be corrected in the translation if necessary.