A Practice Report On The C-E Translation Of A Brief History Of Translation In China And The West (Chapter 9)

This translation report is based on A Brief History of Translation in China and the West edited by Professor Xie Tianzhen.The ninth chapter of this book,Translation and Esperanto:The Influence of Translation on Chinese Culture,has been selected as source text of the translation task.The main content of this chapter includes three parts: the influence of translations of Buddhist texts on modern Chinese language and literature,translation and the New Cultural Movement in China in the late Qing Dynasty,and translated literature as well as the formation and development of modern Chinese literature.The detailed introduction to the formation of Chinese translation history and the influence of translation activities on Chinese culture shows a strong value of research in translation.Therefore,the translation of this text will help to promote a better foreign dissemination of Chinese culture.The source text selected for this translation practice focuses on the influence of Buddhist scriptures translation on Chinese culture and the development history of translation in China,it also covers a great number of Buddhist sutra terms and literary contents.To deal with these challenges,the translator chooses the Skopos Theory proposed by Hans Vermeer as the theoretical guide and analyzes the translation with three rules of the theory,namely the Skopos rule,the rule of coherence and the rule of fidelity.Then,the translator classifies and explores the source text by combining the two translation strategies of documentary translation and instrumental translation.It enables the translator considers not only the reading habits and styles of the target language readers but also the language style of the source text.For the distinctive words and logical sentences in the source text,the translator adopts word-by-word translation or line-by-line comparison;for the parts of the source text that do not differ much from the translated text but can be adjusted in sentence structure,the translator adopts literal translation or grammatical translation;for the sentences with strong cultural information in the source text,in order to facilitate the understanding of the readers of the translated language,the translator adopts documentary or academic translation to deal with these culturally loaded words and sentences.For the sentences with strong cultural information in the source text,the translator uses the philological or learned translation method to add notes for these culturally loaded words in order to facilitate the understanding of the target language readers;and for some parts that need to reflect the phonetic process of the words,the method of foreignizing translation is chose to deal with the problem.Through this translation practice,the translator holds that the two translation strategies of documentary translation and instrumental translation under the guidance of Skopos Theory are meaningful for texts with strong cultural information.However,it becomes a prominent problem whether the translator should adopt the vernacular as a medium to translate the classical Chinese into English.The translator will conduct further explorations and researches in this field to find a better method to translate this kind of text.