A Report On Chinese Translation Of The Chinese Industrial Cooperative Movement And The Political Polarization Of Wartime China 1938-1945

This translation project is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Douglas Robinson’s doctoral thesis of Columbia University "The Chinese Industrial Cooperative Movement and the Political Polarization of Wartime China 1938-1945",published in 1975.There were seven chapters in the source text,which mainly describes the origin,course and decline of Chinese Industrial Cooperative Movement(CIC),and analyzes the main reasons for the decline of the CIC Movement,which includes the internal political polarization of the national government,wartime inflation and the return of refugees from the occupied regions in the wartime.The CIC Movement was an industrial cooperative movement jointly launched by Chinese and foreign progressives to fight the War of Resistance by self-help production.The source text is a research dissertation of history and the source language is rigorous concise and accurate.There are a lots of complex sentences with a large number of parallel structures and embodied sentences,and the source text contains a large number of cultural loaded words such as proper names of people,places,institutions organization;publications including academic works,periodicals,and original correspondence,telegraphs,reports.Moreover,the author cited a large number of history documents as footnotes,sometimes even longer than the source text on the same page.All these led to translating difficulties to the translator.The translator of this article focuses on domestication translation strategies,guided by back translation theory,and tried to back translate these cultural loaded words into academic discourse of CIC Movement and anti Japanese aggression with which the target readers are familiar.The long and complex source sentences were transformed into target parataxis structure.In the process of completing this translation practice project,the translator found that it is not possible to simply use literal translation or free translation when back-translating Chinese culturally loaded words,only by consulting a large number of academic monographs,memoirs,autobiography and academic research papers related to the Chinese CIC Movement.Due to the translator’s limited knowledge of the historical and cultural wall,and due to the limited time-honored materials,certain cultural information cannot be fully and accurately back-translated.Upon finishing this translation project,the research founding indicates that it is far from acceptable for the translator simply adopt literal or free translation methods besides a good bilingual and cultural competence,the translator also need a good command of Chinese history and literature searching.Only by searching a large number academic monographs,memoirs,autobiographies and journal articles,the accurate back translation of the cultural loaded words can be achieved.