A Report On C-E Translation Of Yue Fei Zhuan (Chapters 1-2) Under The Guidance Of Communicative Translation

The Yue Fei Zhuan is an important historical work that summarizes the political and military studies of the Northern Song and Southern Song dynasties,written by Deng Guangming,a professor at Peking University.The author described Yue Fei’s life and merit vividly and accurately according to the dimension of history.Based on extensive research and analysis of historical materials,the book makes a true and fair evaluation of this historical figure,which is of great historical value and reference significance.The first and second chapters of the book are selected as the translation text in this practice report.The translation material includes the confrontation and struggle among the Liao Dynasty,Northern Song Dynasty and Jin Dynasty,the transfer and reconstruction of political power and Yue Fei’s deeds in the early days of the war against the Jin Dynasty.Through the analysis of the characteristics of the text,it is considered that this paper belongs to a biographical text,focusing on clarifying historical events to convey historical facts and giving priority to informative functions so as to show objective and real historical characters.Thus the text is mainly information-based.At the same time,the text covers a large number of traditional cultural factors and there are some difficulties and challenges in translation,such as culture-loaded words,four-character words,proper nouns,official positions,classical Chinese,run-on sentences and non-subject sentences.In order to achieve a better effect of cultural communication,the acceptability for readers of the source language culture should be taken into consideration.Newmark believes that communicative translation theory focuses on the transmission of information and emphasizes that it is reader-oriented highlighting the response of readers,which usually achieves better results in terms of communicative purposes.This paper makes a case analysis of the application of communicative translation at the lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.After discussion and summary,it can be found that communicative translation can give better guidance to the translation of biographical texts of historical figures.At the lexical level,the methods and techniques of transliteration plus annotation,literal translation plus annotation,addition,free translation,paraphrase and idiomatic translation are mainly adopted,hoping to convey the original information and increase the readability of the text on the basis of preserving the cultural characteristics of the source language.At the syntactic level,the methods and techniques such as addition,paraphrase,combination,division and shift are used in order to better solve the problem of language differences between English and Chinese and make the text more fluent.At the textual level,cohesive devices like conjunction and reference are used to enhance the coherence of the text.In this translation practice report,some implications for the translation of the same type of text are provided.Some references are also given for the practical application of communicative translation in similar texts.