A Report On C-E Translation Of History Of Ancient Chinese Artifact Design(Chapters 5,8 And 10)

This is a practice report on Chinese-English translation of Chapter 5,Chapter 8and Chapter 10 of History of Ancient Chinese Artifact Design.This book is narrated in the order of dynasties,based on social culture and historical conditions,with classic examples as the background,focusing on detailed narration and analysis of the shape,color,pattern,texture,sense of quantity and using mode of the objects from the aspects of the types,shapes,functional structures and production techniques of the objects.It helps readers to systematically understand the evolution of traditional handicraft industry in ancient China and the knowledge of artifacts,and explore the way of thinking and behavior of ancestors in the process of artifacts.The source text records the artifacts of various dynasties in words and pictures in a detailed and logical way,and has high research and translation value.This Chinese-English translation practice is relatively difficult,and the translation difficulties are mainly reflected in the translation of terminologies and complex sentences of production utensils(production tools and textile and sewing tools),life utensils(diet utensils,furniture,ceramic products and metal products and glassware),military productions(chariots,battle ships and weapons),traffic equipment(carriages,ships and currency).The translator searches many parallel texts to understand the structure of artifacts.Then,the Machine Translation(MT)engine Niu Trans and the Computer Aided Translation(CAT)platform,are used to improve the translation efficiency by creating translation projects,building a term base and translation memory database to ensure the consistency and accuracy of terminology translation in the translation process.Moreover,the translation quality evaluation report is checked by the translation quality verification and translation quality assessment function of Trados,and manual editing is carried out to ensure the quality of translation.The terminologies of the ancient Chinese artifacts in this report are culture-specific terms,which is what Aixelá calls culture-specific terms.It is difficult for the translator to translate culture-specific items because there is no corresponding item in the target language or the item has a different textual status.This translation practice report uses Aixelá’s three translation methods(transliteration,extratextual gloss and limited universalization)and literal translation at the lexical level.The translator adopts linear translation,omission,division,amplification and sentence restructuring at the syntactic level.This report summarizes and compacts the glossary of terminologies in Chapter 5,Chapter 8 and Chapter 10 of History of Ancient Chinese Artifact Design,hoping to provide some reference for the translation of such terminologies.Through this translation practice,the translator has improved the translation level and has a deeper understanding of different translation methods.