A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Komedie Stamboel Popular Theater In Colonial Indonesia,1891-1903

This report is based on the translation practice of chapters 4 to 6 of Komedie Stamboel Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia,1891–1903 by Matthew Isaac Cohen.The work is a vivid depiction of the popular troupe Komedie Stamboel which developed in Indonesia at the end of the 19 th century,as well as an in-depth analysis of Eurasian identities in both colonial and post-colonial Indonesia.It accords with the essential characteristics of non-fiction literature,which has both authenticity and literariness.It can be regarded as an informative text as well as an expressive text.The characteristics of the original text can be summarized as the following: real content,objective narration,rich Indonesian background knowledge and culture.To accurately convey the information,and reproduce the literariness of the source text,the author chooses the semantic translation and communicative translation theory put forward by the British translation theorist Peter Newmark,and analyzes the application of the chosen translation theory through discussing the solution of translation key and difficult points in practice.The key and difficult points include:(1)at the lexical level,there exist many proper nouns and culture-loaded terms as the book covers many fields and contains some statements in Javanese and Dutch;(2)at the syntactical level,the original author often uses concise expressions and applies rhetoric devices such as simile,parallelism and repetition;(3)in terms of textual coherence,the original author focuses on the development history of the troupe to construct the discourse,which is highly argumentative and logical.On the basis of the above-mentioned points,the author has an in-depth analysis of the translation of proper nouns including Indonesian arts,troupe names and special groups in Indonesia,as well as implicit content,and also discusses how to reproduce the rhetoric of the original text as well as achieve textual coherence through the translation of sentence group.This paper further proposes some feasible translation techniques under the guidance of semantic and communicative translation theory: for proper nouns and culture-loaded terms,annotation should be adopted to provide the target readers relevant background knowledge and covey the cultural annotations under the guidance of communicative translation;for implicit content,explicitation should be used to illustrate hidden meaning to make target text easy to understand for target readers with communicative translation;for rhetoric devices,the literal translation should be guided by semantic translation to keep the linguistic features of the original;for sentence group,communicative translation is used to solve the problems in translating sentence group through shifting cohesive devices and rearranging logic progressing in order to make the target language readers get a similar effect to the source language readers.In summary,this paper flexibly combines semantic translation and communicative translation theory to analyze the difficulties in the translation of non-fiction literature and explore feasible methods,in the hope of having a certain reference for the translation and research of non-fiction literature in the future.