A Report On The Translation Practice Of "The Age Of Taiping In The World"(Chapter 2)

The author of "The Age of World Peace"(chapter 2),Rihiko Takano is a professor of Japanese Gakushuin University Literature and was the first president of the Japanese Archives Society,since 2010,he has been the librarian of the Gakushuin University Library.In 2015,he won the Kawakawa Yuanyi award for his book “The court and religion in modern times”.The second chapter focuses on a series of decrees issued by the shogunate to secure its dominance,including a relaxation of End adopted son ban and a ban on samurai martyrdom,these orders had a profound effect on Japanese society.The social development of the Edo period described in the book laid the foundation for the rise of modern Japan,which has certain reference value for our country to study the history and culture of modern Japan.The translation report uses Nida’s functional equivalence theory to guide the translation of historical texts.Functional equivalence theory is a translation theory proposed by Eugene A.Nida,a famous American linguist,translator and translation theorist.Since its introduction into China,it has been the focus and hot spot of research in China’s translation and academic circles.It is mainly used for English-Chinese translation of technical texts,business texts,advertising texts,etc.,and is rarely combined with Japanese historical texts.The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of combining functional equivalence theory with Japanese historical texts under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,and to provide reference for the future application of functional equivalence theory in the translation of such historical texts.The research content of this thesis is historical text translation under the guidance of functional equivalence theory.At present,exchanges between China and Japan are becoming more frequent,and domestic research on Japanese history is becoming more and more enriched,and the translator’s translation of "The Age of World Peace"(Chapter 2)is of certain value to the study of Japanese history and culture.During the translation process,the translator found that the tone of the original work was rigorous,the language was accurate,and there were a large number of Japanese cultural load words and related historical knowledge,which required high content fidelity and accuracy of the translated text.Since the grammatical structure of Chinese and Japanese is completely different.When translating texts,the form and structure of the original text cannot be rigidly applied.While restoring the information of the original text from the aspects of vocabulary and syntax,the translator also needs to highly convey the meaning of the original text,so that the translation reader can get a feeling similar to the readers of original text as much as possible.Therefore,the translation needs to go through four steps,namely,analysis,transformation,reorganization,and testing,to check whether the meaning of the translated text is equivalent to the meaning of the original text.That is,to achieve the "closest natural equivalent",so that the translation is as close to the original text as possible.In addition,the translation needs to be natural and without a translation cavity.These requirements are highly consistent with Nida’s functional equivalence theory.Therefore,the author chose Functional equivalence theory in this translation practice,and operated on the cultural load words and parts of speech of the original text through translation strategies such as part of speech conversion,additional translation,and provincial translation,and added historical and cultural related knowledge to achieve faithfulness and style consistency of the original text.