A Chinese-English Translation Report Of The Meandering Jinjiang River:The History Of The Bashu Culture(Excerpt) Guided By Vinay And Darbelnet’s Translation Theory

This paper is a C-E translation practice report,and the source text of the translation project is The Meandering Jinjiang River: The History of the Bashu Culture compiled by Duan Yu and Tan Luofei.This book describes the evolution of the Bashu culture from the prehistorical times to the Ming and Qing Dynasties.The translator is responsible for translating the first and second sections of Chapter Seven which includes the changes in the political system,migration,economy,and culture in Bashu during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.Then this report has been written according to the translation practice.Considering that the source text is informative in the field of history and culture,the translator should faithfully convey the information of the source text on the premise of maintaining readability,which coincides with the view that Vinay and Darbelnet hold: Subjective assumptions should be reduced in translation.Besides,they advocate using two major translation methods,that is,direct translation and oblique translation,and their corresponding specific methods in different conditions,namely,borrowing,calque,literal translation,transposition,modulation,equivalence and adaptation.In their opinion,direct translation is used in some translation tasks in which it may be possible to transpose the source language element by element because these tasks are based on parallel categories or on parallel concepts,or there are gaps or lacunae in the target language which must be filled by corresponding elements.When there are no words with the same semantics in the target language,the words in the source language can be directly transplanted to the target language by means of borrowing,or new expressions that imitate those of the source language can be created in the target language by using calque.When word-for-word translation is feasible,the literal translation is used.On the other hand,because of some structural or metalinguistic differences between the SL and the TL,certain stylistic effects cannot be transposed into the target language without changing the syntactic order,or even lexis.In this situation,the translator can use the oblique translation.As Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation theory can help the translator keep the readability of the translation and faithfully convey the information of the source text,these two scholars’ translation theory is taken by the translator as the theoretical guidance in this C-E translation practice.When dealing with gaps or lacunae in the target language,such as place names,some ancient official positions in China,ancient county annals,opera categories and so on,the translator adopts the direct translation method such as borrowing and calque to fill the gaps or lacunae to the greatest extent.For source texts that are in parallel categories or concepts or can find equivalent expressions in the target language and require high objectivity,such as historical data records,the literal translation is adopted to ensure the objectivity of the translation.When it is necessary to preserve certain stylistic effects of the source language by changing the syntactic order or even lexis,the translator uses the oblique translation methods.For example,the translator uses transposition at lexical level,modulation at syntactic level,equivalence or adaptation to describe the same situation in different styles and structures,so as to transplant and retain the specific stylistic effects of the source language.This report analyzes specific cases in this C-E translation practice based on Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation theory,and discusses how to use this theory to guide the C-E translation practice of information-based historical and cultural texts,so as to provide some reference for the C-E translation practice of such texts and make a little contribution to the “Chinese culture going global”.