Strategies Of Conveying Information In Museum Exhibition Texts

As Chinese culture goes global,the translation work for Chinese cultural texts has been increasingly significant.Museums have always been an important window for foreign visitors to learn about Chinese culture.On this account,museums are supposed to improve the translation quality of their exhibition texts to help foreign visitors have a clear grasp of these texts.This paper discusses the difficulties and strategies of conveying information in Chinese museum exhibition texts based on the C-E translation project for Hainan Museum Exhibition of Artifacts,with a view to providing some insights into the translation of similar texts.The paper first introduces the background information of the project and analyzes its language features.Then,the paper,based on specific cases,elaborates on and classifies the difficulties of conveying information in this project into three categories: flowery language in titles,some of which cannot function as the summary for the text below;vagueness of the source text that lacks coherence;and excessive information in just one sentence or paragraph.At last,by comparing the author’s translation version with the final version,the paper proposes six strategies for the above difficulties: focusing on the key words of the title;summarizing the text below the title;adding some information where appropriate;clarifying the contextual connections;breaking long sentences into short units according to sense groups;and using proper cohesive devices where appropriate.