A Report On The C-E Translation Of History Of Ancient Chinese Artifact Design (Chapters 6 & 7)

This report is a translation practice report based on Chinese-English translation.The selected texts are Chapters 6&7 of the book History of Ancient Chinese Artifact Design by Du Haibin,Hu Haiquan,and Zhao Yan.This book analyzes the origin,evolution,and development process of ancient Chinese artifacts from the perspective of product design,absorbing literature and materials from traditional craftsmanship,technology,social life,and other aspects,which renders the content of the entire history of craftsmanship design more substantial.The Chapters 6&7 are translated in this translation practice report,including five parts:daily necessities,transportation tools,furniture,funeral ware,lacquerware,and production and manufacturing techniques during the Sui,Tang,and Song dynasties.The original text has significant logic and detailed contents.The original Chinese text has 21,198 characters,and the English translation is 20,614 words.The translation difficulties of the original text in this Chinese-English translation practice are relatively high,mainly reflected in the translation of unique artifacts in ancient China,such as porcelain,lacquerware and its shapes,ships,furniture,as well as the syntactic translation of ship structures.To solve these translation difficulties,parallel literature,and relevant historical materials as well as many legends are searched,and terminology is collected,to create a bilingual term base.Secondly,a translation project is created using the computer-aided translation(CAT)tool such as Niutrans engine to establish a corpus to ensure consistency and accuracy in the translation process.Finally,the quality control(QA)module is used to ensure the output quality of the translation.In terms of terminology translation methods,this report adopts methods such as literal translation,transliteration with annotations,transliteration with footnotes,and literal translation with footnotes.In the translation of complex sentence structures related to the professional knowledge of ancient Chinese artifact design,this report employs methods such as restructuring and division.This translation practice report summarizes and compiles a term base for the artifact design of the Sui,Tang,and Song dynasties in China by translating “Chapter 6 Artifact Design during the Sui and Tang Dynasties” and “Chapter 7 Artifact Design during the Song Dynasty” into English.It is hoped to provide some reference for the future translation of such texts.Although CAT is helpful to improve translation efficiency,machine translation(MT)still needs to be improved in terms of translation of artifacts,shapes,ships,furniture,and others,and appropriate post editing methods are needed to ensure the quality of translation.