A Report On The C-E Translation Of Chapter 5 Of A History Of Chinese Musical Literature

Chinese music is an integral part of Chinese culture.Music in ancient China cultivated people’s temperament and regulated human behavior,while Chinese literature was inextricably tied up with music.Thus the musicality of Chinese literature represents a unique characteristic of Chinese culture.The report is based on the C-E translation practice of Chapter 5 of A History of Chinese Musical Literature by Zhu Qianzhi.In the source text,Zhu Qianzhi aimed to share his idea on the close connection between music and literature by showing resources and historical facts about the evolution of music in the Yue-fu ballads.The source text presents Chinese traditional culture about the ballads and ancient metrical patterns.The translator intended to introduce these cultures to English-speaking readers,making her humble contribution to cultural exchanges worldwide.Zhu Qianzhi discussed many issues on the Yue-fu poetry debated in the academic circle:the musical definition of Yue-fu,the taxonomy of the Yue-fu ballads,the place of the Yue-fu ballads in music,the origin,development,and transmutation of the Yue-fu ballads and a study on the "Beat-Phrase Notation" of the Yue-fu ballads.His objective and unbiased perspective of literary evolution brings out the best in the article.The source text is an informative text and has some expressive features.Thus guided by Newmark’s Communicative and Semantic Translation Theory,the report adopted a mixed translation strategy with Communicative Translation as the mainstay and Semantic Translation as a complement to solve the difficulties the translator encountered in the translation process,including culture-loaded terms,classical Chinese texts,and loose and unstructured sentences.Accordingly,the reporter translated these different cases with communicative translation techniques like paraphrasing,amplification,restructuring,and semantic translation approaches such as literal translation,literal translation plus annotation,and transliteration plus annotation.The translation practice demonstrates that semantic translation is needed for some significant culture-loaded terms and abstruse concepts in classical Chinese texts.In contrast,communicative translation matters more in other difficulties or features in the source text.Flexible combined use of both in various scenarios can achieve ideal translation results.