A C-E Translation Practice Report On Introduction To Sister Cities Of Chengdu (Excerpts)

The report is based on the C-E translation project of Introduction to Sister Cities of Chengdu(excerpts).As a basic written material of Chengdu International Sister Cities Exhibition to introduce the profiles of cities in various countries that have established sister city relationship with Chengdu,the source text takes conveying information as its main function.Meanwhile the source text works as the publicity material of Chengdu International Sister Cities Exhibition which means that it also has the functions of calling upon readership and expressing the feelings of the source text author.Firstly,at the lexical level,the source text features Chinese culture-loaded words,foreign proper nouns,and four-character words.The source text author mentions the culture and customs of Chengdu,hence the usage of Chinese culture-loaded words.As the text contains the history and development of sister cities,there are many foreign proper nouns,including the historical events and names of people and places.Moreover,the writing style of the source text is concise because the author tends to use fourcharacter words to represent complicated meanings.Secondly,at the syntactic level,the source text is characterized by run-on sentences and sentences with rhetorical devices.When introducing the basic facts of sister cities,the author focuses on listing the information,resulting in run-on sentences.Besides,to illustrate the development of cities and exchanges between Chengdu and its sister cities,the author applies personification and metaphor in the sentence.Thirdly,at the textual level,the source text features implicit logic cohesion,paragraphs with multi-theme,and paragraphs with scenic description.The logic of the text is clear even with limited connectives among paragraphs,hence the usage of implicit logic cohesion.The author tends to put all the information about one city in one paragraph,resulting in the paragraphs with multi-theme.Moreover,there are paragraphs with scenic description to achieve the vocative function of the text.Taking the Text Typology Theory of Peter Newmark as the theoretical basis,the translator summarizes and reflects on this translation project from the perspective of semantic translation,communicative translation,and the combination of semantic translation and communicative translation.The report holds that semantic translation and communicative translation are feasible to guide the translation of the multi-functional text.Under the guidance of semantic translation,for the four-character words that share the same literal meaning and contextual meaning,literal translation can be applied to retain the content and form of the source text.As for the translation of rhetorical devices,if the contextual meaning of the word exists in both Chinese and English culture,literal translation can be adopted.Additionally,communicative translation aims to cater to the language and culture of target readers.It can instruct the translation of scenic description sentences by applying the method of parody to imitate expressions and structure in the target language.For the translation of run-on sentences,reorganization can be applied to reproduce the source text logic by dividing and restructuring the sentence in terms of the semantic meaning.For implicit logic cohesion,connectives can be added to make the logic explicit.For the four-character words that have different literal meaning and contextual meaning as well as rhetorical devices that the contextual meaning of the word does not exist in both Chinese and English culture simultaneously,paraphrasing can be adopted to convey the real intention of the author.Lastly,the combination of semantic translation and communicative translation can be the guidance for the translation of Chinese culture-loaded words and foreign proper nouns.Chinese culture-loaded words can be rendered by the method of literal translation with annotation to retain cultural features of the source text.Back translation with annotation can be adopted for the translation of foreign proper nouns to add more historical and cultural knowledge for readers who are interested in the source text to get more information.It is hoped that this report can provide a reference for the translation of relevant texts.