| China Discourses in American Orientalism: Reading Pearl S.Buck’s SinoAmerican Transnational Writings is the first study on American Orientalism in Chinese studies,which is a Chinese scholar’s reflection and study on five “China discourses” in the American historical and cultural tradition.The material for this translation practice is drawn from Chapter 5 of the book,which takes Pearl S.Buck’s Nobel Prize speech,The Chinese Novel,as an entry point to explain her aesthetics of populist narratives and her authority in advocating Chinese culture through her commentaries on Chinese intellectuals such as Lin Yu-tang and Soong May-ling.The book is a typical academic text in the humanities as it is an extended study on American Orientalism and P.S.Buck’s transnational writing on the basis of the original writer’s doctoral dissertation.In the process of translation,the author has found that this type of text is logical and complex in its structure and contains a large number of terms and long sentences,which poses greater difficulties to the understanding and the translation of the author.Nida’s functional equivalence theory means that translation does not seek to achieve a word-by-word correspondence between words in terms of form,but to achieve a functional equivalence between two languages.The translation of academic texts aims at conveying information and expressing the views and thoughts in the texts to readers,which coincides with the functional equivalence theory that emphasizes the consistency of the responses from readers.Guided by the theory of functional equivalence,this translation report analyzes the Chinese-English translation methods of humanities academic texts from the perspective of terms and sentences,including literal translation,free translation,annotation,addition,omission,division,combination,shift,voice conversion,etc. |
