A Report On C-E Translation Of China Discourse In American Orientalism

As academic exchanges are on the rise between Chinese scholars and those abroad,there is an increasingly urgent need of translation in academic works.Translation plays a critical part in determining how the international academia evaluates China’s academic capability and quality.However,the reality is,the works in the front of natural science and other non-literary disciplines can turn to machine translation and post translation editing while literary treatise which involves cultural elements,cultural exchanges should be considered in its translation,thus becoming a challenging task to the translators.This report,based on the Chinese-to-English translation of the introduction and first chapter of China Discourse in American Orientalism: A Study of Pearl S.Buck’s Sino-American Transnational Writings explores the translation strategies and methods used in translating the alike texts by means of Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion Theory.In this theory,he proposed four translation stages: trust,aggression,incorporation and compensation.This report unfolds how trust is built between the author and his work and the translator as well as between target readers and the original work in “trust” stage,how the translator deal with the difficulties at lexical level such as demonstrative pronouns and culture-loaded words and those at syntactic level like long sentences,nonsubject sentences and passive sentences by comprehending the original text,interpreting the meaning to the readers and compensating what is overinterpreted or missing.As these obstacles are quite common in the literary academic monography,this report aims to contribute to the translation of literary academic monograph.