A Report On The C-E Translation Of Historical Novel The Fifteen Days (Excerpts)

This translation report is based on the C-E translation of The Fifteen Days,a historical novel by the Chinese writer Ma Boyong.The book tells the story of Zhu Zhanji,the crown prince of the Ming Dynasty,who rushed from Nanjing to Beijing to save himself and the fate of the Ming Dynasty.And the experience along the way affected his understanding of how to be a great emperor and deepened his comprehension of the phrase “people are the most important in a state.”Given the linguistic features of the source text,the high-context and low-context cultures theory by Edward T.Hall is used as a guide for this translation practice.With the help of high-and low-context cultures theory,the translator chooses translation techniques,like amplification,omission,restructuring,and others,to solve the problems encountered in translation.In this report,the translator analyzes the guidance of high-and low-context cultures theory on the Chinese-English translation of the historical novel from lexical level,syntactic level,and discoursal level.At the lexical level,the translation of culture-loaded words,onomatopoeia,and appellations are analyzed,and the translator adds the cultural background information hidden in the high-context culture to make the target readers have a more comprehensive understanding of these words.At the syntactic level,the translator analyzes the real information hidden in declarative,interrogative,imperative,and exclamatory sentences in the high-context culture,and transforms the sentence patterns according to the real intention expressed in the source text to make the meaning of the sentences more accurate.At the discoursal level,the translator analyzes both the implicit adversative and causal relations in the discourse,and expresses the hidden logical relations in the high-context culture clearly with logical conjunctions,thus making the discourse more cohesive and coherent.In the end,it would be great if this translation task could help Chinese literary works become more known around the world.