A Report On C-E Translation Practice Of Tales Of The Imperial Palace Of The Southern Song Dynasty From The Perspective Of Cross-Cultural Translation

Interlingual translation connects two different languages,and language is the carrier of culture and reflects the cultural reality.Therefore,translation is not only the transformation between two language symbols,but also cross-cultural communication between the two languages.Eugene Nida’s “functional equivalence” theory suggests that target reader should obtain the meaning equivalent to that source reader gets from the perspective of reader’s response.On this basis,Susan Bassnett further proposed“cultural functional equivalence”,emphasizing the importance of culture as a basic unit of translation,and requiring translators to convey equivalent cultural connotations to target readers as much as possible,thus unfolding a boom in “cultural turn” in translation studies.The cultural turn of translation not only expands the field of translation studies,but also limits the degree of freedom while endowing translators with freedom of translation,and recognizes the important role of translators in balancing source language & culture with target language & culture.From the perspective of cross-cultural translation,the translator translated Tales of the Imperial Palace of the Southern Song Dynasty,one of the “2020 Zhejiang Province Social Science Fund Projects”.The book is divided into three chapters,totaling more than 30,000 characters.Entrusted by the author Liu Xijuan,the translator started the work in July,2020.Noteworthily,the translation proceeded simultaneously with the author’s writing.It took 11 months to complete the translation and proofreading of the book.In addition,with the consent of the author,the translator also undertook the initial examination and proofreading of the original text by modifying the problems of improper sentence division and wrongly-written characters.As far as the translation process is concerned,the translator has comprehensively adopted such translation methods as transliteration,transliteration plus annotation,literal translation,free translation,and various techniques such as addition and omission translation,substitution translation,transposition translation,etc.All these translation methods and techniques serve the translator’s purpose of language and cultural conversion.The translation of this book has promoted the cultural image of the ancient capital Hangzhou,and introduced Chinese culture to foreign readers.This report is a summary and reflection of the translation task.The main body adopts the case analysis method to analyze the translation examples which embody the“cultural functional equivalence” from the lexical,syntactic,and textual level.As far as the significance is concerned,this translation practice report implements the principle of combining theory with practice,and highly summarizes the translation activities.The translation methods and techniques described in this paper may serve as reference for the subsequent translation of relevant historical and cultural texts.