A Practice Report On The C-E Translation Of Insights Into Culture Of Beijing Opera (Excerpt) Guided By Relevance Theory Of Translation

This is a translation practice report whose source text is selected from a textbook Insights into Culture of Beijing Opera edited by Wang Yun and Wang Qiaoyun.The book was published by Gansu Education Press.The translator selects the first four sections of the chapter named Base as material of translation practice,including introduction of fundamental characteristics of Beijing Opera,the birth of Beijing Opera,the four major roles of Beijing Opera and different genres of Beijing opera.The text systematically elaborates Beijing Opera from different perspectives,which involves a large number of Peking Opera terms and the expressions of rich Chinese linguistic features.In the process of Chinese-English translation,the translator seeks to reach the balance between retaining the original meaning of the authors and reduce the barriers of reading.This translation practice report takes Insights into Beijing Opera as an example,while selects relevance theory of translation as the guiding theory,follows the principle of cognition as well as the principle of optimal relevance,puts forward solutions to the difficulties in the translation of arts and humanities texts.During the translation practice,the translator summarizes three typical problems,namely,lexical gap,redundancy of short sentences and overuse of repetition.At the lexical level,translating words lacking counterparts is solved by transliteration plus annotation and literal translation plus annotation.At the syntactic level,redundancy of short sentences is solved by combining short sentences into long ones,so that the target text would conforms to the syntactic features of English.At the contextual level,overuse of repetition in the source text is solved by adoption of pronoun references and ellipsis.In this practice report,the author lists the typical problems during the translation practice and provides solutions to them as an attempt to benefit translators of arts and humanities texts.