A Report Of E-C Translation On The Robert Morrison And The Protestant Plan For China (Excerpts)

Historical work is an important crystal of thought that has been left over from the development of human social history and that can help us understand,interpret and reconstruct the historical scene.As a link of cultural communication,translators should take responsibility for translating historical work and promoting academic exchange in historical field.Exerting translator’s subjectivity in translation process helps translators play a better role of a bridge in academic exchange.Therefore,this report takes translator’s subjectivity as the theoretical basis,regards the translation of Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China as the study object,analyzes the difficulties in translation practice,and explores the methods to improve the quality of historical work translation.With a combined approach of theoretical analysis and translation practice,this report analyzes the ideas inspired by translator’s subjectivity and summarizes the effective methods to improve the translation quality of historical work.This report finds that the translation of historical texts embodies three basic characteristics of translator’s subjectivity,namely subjective initiative,passivity and purposefulness.Inspired by translator’s subjective initiative,translators can search for parallel text to translate complex sentences;inspired by translator’s passivity,translators can use back translation to make the translation of proper nouns accurate;inspired by translator’s purposefulness,translators can translate sentences with absent information by adding explanations.The report finds that these three basic characteristics are dialectically unified,inspiring translators to think about the methods that can solve translation difficulties and improve the translation quality in a comprehensive way.It is feasible to improve the translation quality of historical work from the perspective of three basic characteristics of translator’s subjectivity.