A Practice Report On The C-E Translation Of A Brief History Of Translation In China And The West (Chapter 12)

The twelfth chapter of the book——A Brief History of Translation in China and the West by Xie Tianzhen,is selected as the source text to translate and research in the practice report.The content of this chapter mainly involves three aspects,namely,the foreign translation of Chinese cultural classics,ancient Chinese literary masterpieces,and Chinese modern and contemporary literary masterpieces.The main works involved include Confucian classics such as The Analects of Confucius,Taoist classics such as Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu,The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,The Legend of Water Margin,The Journey to the West,A Dream of Red Mansions and other masterpieces of ancient Chinese literature,and translations of Chinese modern and contemporary literature from Britain,the United States,Russia,and other European countries.Guided by the theory of Chesterman’s Memes of Translation,the translator applies syntactic strategies,semantic strategies,and pragmatic strategies under the strategy of memes in this translation practice report from the perspectives of expectation norms,and professional norms of norm memes.The difficulties encountered in the translation process mainly include the translation of distinctive cultural vocabulary,long and complex sentences,the titles of literary works,and historical events etc.Through the translation practice,the translator found that the grammar and acceptability of characteristic cultural vocabulary can follow the expectancy norms;For titles with strong cultural information,the translator follows the accountability norm,ensuring that the translation remains faithful to both the original writer and the target language reader;For words with distinct characteristics in the source text,a literal translation was adopted;For sentences with rhetoric,the translator adopts the strategy of scheme change;For those parts of the sentence structure that need to de adjusted due to the differences between the source text and the target text,the translator changes the sentence structure to conform to the language habits of the target language readers.This practice report aims to convey the information of the source text,expand the oversight of the translator,and explore Chinese-English translation method of Chinese academic writing.The practice shows that translation memetics can guide the translation activities of the academic texts of Chinese classical literature that mainly focuses on information transmission so that makes the translation conforms to the language and ways of thinking of the target language readers and achieves the purpose of information transmission and cross-cultural communication.In addition,the translator recognized the guiding role of the Memes of Translation in academic texts,and hoped to provide a reference for the translation practice of other related studies in this field.