A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Perils Of Interpreting:The Extraordinary Lives Of Two Translators Between Qing China And The British Empire (Excerpts)

The source text of this translation project is excerpted from The Perils of Interpreting:The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire.Authored by Henrietta Harrison,a famous British historian,and published by Princeton University Press in 2021,the book is a fascinating history of China’s relations with the West---told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators,Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton.By referring to Chinese and English archives and documents,Henrietta Harrison clarifies the background of the Martgarney Embassy.She demonstrates that the Qing court’s ignorance about the British did not simply happen,but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton.Chapters 12-15 narrate the life story of Staunton,a British interpreter in the British Macartney Mission in 1793.How did he intervene in the exchanges that he mediated? And what did these exchanges mean to him?This report describes the problems encountered in the translation process,and explores the causes of these problems.It is suggested that semantic translation and communicative translation are of good pertinence to the translation of The Perils of Interpreting.As a historical biography,the source text has dual features of literariness and non-fictional account.Semantic translation attempts to recreate the serious literature style of The Perils of Interpreting,while communicative translation attempts to convey the non-fictional historical account of the source text.This report is divided into five parts.Chapter one is the introduction.Chapter two describes the translation process.Chapter Three introduces Newmark’s translation theory,including the proposal and comparison of semantic translation and communicative translation with emphasis on their respective applicability to the rendition of historical biographical texts.Chapter Four is the case analysis.Chapter Five is the reflection on the translation project.