A Report On English Translation Of The Communication Of China And The West(Excerpt Of Chapter Two)

The translation project of The Communication of China and the West is part of the 2020 National Social Science Fund "Chinese Academic Works Translation Project".This project aims to publish the excellent works of Chinese philosophy and social science research in foreign languages by foreign authoritative publishing houses to enhance the understanding of contemporary China and traditional Chinese culture,together with the international influence of Chinese philosophy and social sciences.As an informative text,The Communication of China and the West is an academic monograph on Chinese historiography,explaining the integration of"Chinese learning" and "Western learning" in the cultural exchanges between China and the West in modern times.Relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatics theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson,who defines language communication as an ostensive-inferential activity from the concepts of ostension,communicative clues,contextual effects,and cognitive efforts.Their student Gutt put forward the relevance translation theory on this basis,arguing that translation is an interlingual interpretative activity.The translator has to produce a variety of interpretations of the original text and select the best translation in accordance with the principle of relevance,that is,adequate contextual effects at minimal cognitive efforts.And the translator bears the responsibility of dual inference.In the first process,the translator needs to infer the author’s communicative intention based on the author’s ostension and communicative clues.In the second process,the translator needs to supplement the missing contextual effect according to the cognitive environment of the target language readers and convey the author’s communicative intention.On the basis of a complete understanding of the content of the source text,the translator analyzes the language characteristics from the level of words,sentences,and texts and finds that the differences in proper nouns,terms,complex sentences,classical Chinese,and differences from English text are the main difficulties in understanding and translation.Under the guidance of relevance theory,this report adopts translation skills such as literal translation,free translation,literal translation+free translation,division and reorganization,and supplement of cohesive devices to analyze these difficulties in combination with specific cases.This report is divided into four chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces the project background,project layout,and project significance.The second chapter describes the whole translation process,from pre-translation preparations including the analysis of the source text,the preparation of translation tools,and the introduction of relevance theory,to while-translation process description and aftertranslation proofreading.The third chapter is a case analysis.Under the guidance of relevance theory,the translation of Chinese academic monographs from the level of words,sentences,and texts are explored with specific translation skills.And Chapter 4 is the conclusion of this report,including the gains and lessons of the report.