A Practice Report On E-C Translation Of The Artscents:Exploring The Aesthetics Of Smell And The Olfactory Arts (Excerpt)

The original material of this E-C practice report is excerpted from American philosopher Larry Shiner’s 2020 book Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts.The book has no translation available at present.It discusses the history of olfactory art in the West,as well as the long history of incense culture in Asia,especially in China,India and Japan,and uses historical traces to prove that “fragrance/perfume” has played an important role,so as to call on people not to ignore the aesthetic field of olfactory art.For cultural exchange between the East and the West,the author of this report translates the chapters discussing the history of smell in the West and incense culture in Asia.The style of the original text features well-knit logicality and compact structure with compound sentences and complex sentence.The author explores the translation of proper nouns in perfumes,deverbal nouns,compound sentences,complex sentences,lexical cohesive devices and grammatical cohesive devices in the source text from lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.In the process of translation,the author adopts the strategy of domestication and foreignization,using methods such as conversion,splitting,forward translation and reverse translation,and at the same time carries out appropriate creative translation,so that the translation can achieve the same expressive effect as the original text,and finally achieve the purpose of cultural exchange.By doing this translation practice report,the author has acquired a further understanding of the differences between English and Chinese and thus has a profound understanding of English-Chinese translation.It is hoped that this practice report can provide some references for translators who are interested in olfactory culture in the future.