On Travelogue Translation From A Cultural Back-translation Perspective

This report is based on the English-Chinese translation project A Voyage to the East Indies.This book is a travelogue that mainly records an Englishman’s observations of Guangdong’s history,geography and customs during the Qing Dynasty.Cultural back-translation(Tan,2018a)refers to the kind of translation which uses Country B’s language to translate a story that happened in Country B but is written in Country A’s language.A Voyage to the East Indies is written by a foreigner in English,but it depicts China.To study the E-C translation of this book is in line with the scope of cultural back-translation studies.Under the guidance of cultural back-translation theory,this report has the following research objective: to summarize the methods of restoring the cultural information of the original text;to discuss how the Chinese images portrayed in the original text are changed in the translation.The report has the following findings: when restoring proper nouns as well as words with cultural connotation,the information should be verified through checking related documentation and the contextual background of the original text;in the original text,the author creates the image of a barbaric,vulgar and degenerate China and an unorthodox,hypocritical Chinese Buddhist image.For the overly derogatory description of China in the original text,the translator,while trying to be faithful to the original text,has made some adjustments to the wording in order to reduce the degree of negative image of China,so as to make the translation more in line with the reading expectations of Chinese readers.Through discussion,this study hopes to contribute to the field of E-C travelogue translation.