A Report On C-E Translation Of When Heaven Separated From Earth-A Probe Into Chinese Creation Myths (Excerpts Of Chapter X)

This is a report on the Chinese-English translation of the excerpt from When Heaven Separated from Earth-A Probe into Chinese Creation Myths(《开天辟地:中华创世神话考述》),as one of the Chinese academic classic translation programmes founded by the National Social Science Fund of China.The translator is responsible for translating the third part of Chapter Ten——The Establishment of the Authority:Casting the Nine Tripod Cauldrons.In addition,given the type of this project,the readers of this translation,and the commissioner’s requirements,there are six principles for this translation’s quality:completeness,accuracy,consistency,fluency,objectivity,and readability.According to Newmark’s Text Typology,the original text features a hybrid of type of both expressive and informative text.There are two major features of the source text.On the one hand,it belongs to academic literature,along with faithful descriptions in detail.On the other hand,this literature quotes many classical Chinese texts,including masses of culture-loaded terms,four-word idioms,and non-subject sentences.Based on the analysis above,the combination of semantic translation and communicative translation is mainly used during translation.This report is composed of five chapters.Chapter One introduces the description of the project,the significance of the project,and the structure of the report.Chapter Two presents the task process,namely the work in the pre-translation,in-translation,and post-translation stages.Chapter Three analyses the text type and language features of the source text.Chapter Four illustrates the translation examples and techniques from the aspects of the words,the sentences,and the discourses.Chapter Five includes the findings,limitations,and suggestions of this project.Based on the guidance of the translation theory and the text analysis above,the following techniques are concluded from this translation project.Academic terminologies are rendered through literal translation and free translation.Transliteration combined with annotations is adopted for culture-loaded words of book titles and chapter titles in classical Chinese.Free translation could be used as a translation technique for culture-loaded terms in history,archeology,and divination.Besides,the lengthy sentences and information-intensive sentences are dealt with non-finite clauses and the addition of dashes to improve the readability of the target text.Non-subject sentences are transformed into passive sentences to adapt to the habits of the target language.Moreover,at the textual level,repetition is omitted or substituted to improve the textual coherence.And logic integration is adopted to deal with fuzzy logic in classical Chinese.