A Practice Report On C-E Translation Of Jiangsu Local Cultural History-Suzhou Volume(Excerpts)

Presenting splendid city culture contributes a lot to the construction of soft power when disseminating Chinese culture globally.The translation material of this report is selected from the introduction of Suzhou Opera Culture in Chapter 13 of Jiangsu Local Cultural History-Suzhou Volume.As a crucial branch of Chinese traditional culture,opera features literariness and artistry.And the study of opera translation is conducive to the international spread of traditional opera culture.By analyzing the text content,language features,and styles of the source text,the translator chooses Functional Equivalence Theory proposed by Eugene Nida as the guiding theory,aiming to minimize the target readers’ comprehension deviation from the source language culture.In the part of case analysis,the translator discusses the translation practice from lexical,sentence and textual levels.In terms of lexical translation,the translator chooses paraphrase to explain the cultural connotation of “ancient Chinese vocabulary”,“four-character words”,“names of famous operas” that involved in the text.For some culture-loaded words and specific words,the translator adopts transliteration with annotation and conversion methods to retain the characteristics of the source to ensure semantic equivalence.In terms of sentences,the translator summarizes division,combination and restructuring methods to deal with the translation of sentences without subjects,run-on sentences and long sentences in the source text to pursue the translation’s faithfulness and smoothness.Finally,the translator analyses the logical structure of the text to achieve textual cohesion and coherence.Based on the guidance of Functional Equivalence,the translator takes the pursuit of “semantic equivalence” as the primary goal and “formal equivalence”as the second goal to achieve “the closest natural equivalence” between the source text and target text.Through this translation practice,the translator makes further research and reflection on opera translation,which helps to solve the difficulties in translating Chinese opera culture.Furthermore,the author hopes to provide some references for translators who will be engaged in the field of opera translation and make a little contribution to the spread of Suzhou culture and to improving cultural soft power.