A Report On The C-E Translation Of The Biography Of Huang Xinde(Chapters Five)

The Biography of Huang Xinde is one of the biographies of Chinese intangible cultural heritage and traditional drama inheritors,which is informative and rich in content.It tells the life stories of the famous Huangmei Opera actor Huang Xinde,exhibiting his charisma as a generation of the opera artists vividly and in detail.The whole narrative style is plain and ungarnished.There exist some rhetorical devices,four-character idioms,proverbs,and so on.In addition,many contents in this book are closely related to Huangmei Opera.The main purpose of this translation is to make readers get a better understanding of the opera artist Huang Xinde,and meanwhile promulgate and extol Chinese local drama Huangmei Opera.The translator selects this book’s fifth chapter Restarting Huangmei Opera as the translation practice material,for this chapter records that Huang Xinde returned to Huangmei Opera stage from Beijing Opera stage after the Cultural Revolution,which is a turning point in his life.Basing on the characteristics of the text of this chapter,the translator chooses Newmark’s semantic translation theory as the theoretical guidance for this translation practice.This theory focuses on conveying the content of source text accurately and retaining the original language features,trying to narrow the gap between the target text and the source text.The translator attempts to analyze the application of semantic translation in translation practice from the following levels: the lexical level,the syntactic level,and the rhetoric level.At the lexical level,the translator tries to convey the culture elements of the original words.At the syntactic level,the translator tries to maintain the original sentence patterns or language style on the basis of conveying the original meaning.At the rhetoric level,the translator retains the original rhetoric devices in target text,so as to reproduce the literary flavor of the source text.This translation report consists of five parts.The first part is the introduction,which outlines the research background,the content value of the source text,the research significance and main structure of the practice report.The second part introduces the translation process,which is divided into three sections: Pre-translation,During-translation,and Post-translation.The third part is the theoretical framework,which introduces Newmark’s semantic translation theory,as well as its applicability.The fourth part is case analysis,analyzing some difficulties in translation practice from lexical,syntactic and rhetoric levels under the guidance of semantic translation.The translator mainly uses literal translation,addition,transliteration plus annotation and some other translation methods,trying to accurately convey the content of the source text and reserve the original culture.The fifth part summarizes the gains and limitations in this translation practice.Through this translation practice,the translator finds that semantic translation can better guide the translation of biographical texts.Translating The Biography of Huang Xinde,can make the readers both at home and abroad better understand Chinese Huangmei Opera as well as Chinese opera culture.At the same time,the translator hopes that this report can provide a reference for the translation of biographical texts.