A Report On E-C Translation Of The Brutish Museums (Chapters 4-6)

This report is based on the English-Chinese translation of The Brutish Museums:Bronzes,Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution(Chapters 4-6).The book tells the history of the British stealing Benin bronzes and other cultural relics from the ancient Kingdom of Benin in present-day Nigeria in 1897,thus triggering a discussion on whether to return the cultural relics lost in Africa.The purpose of this translation project is to help Chinese readers understand Benin’s culture and its colonial history,with a view to providing reference for the issue of the restitution of Chinese cultural relics.Based on Katharina Reiss’ s theory of text types,the book focuses on conveying information,so it is an informative text.Guided by Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory,the translator summarizes the following problems at the lexical,syntactic and textual levels.At the lexical level,she deals with the translation of proper nouns and polysemous words by using transliteration plus annotation and selecting the appropriate meaning according to the context.At the syntactic level,she changes passive voice to active voice and strengthens the analysis of sentence logic to solve the problems of passive sentences and long complex sentences.At the textual level,she uses the devices of substitution and reference to achieve cohesion and coherence.Through this translation practice,the translator finds that the functional equivalence theory can effectively guide the translation of African art texts.It can not only provide translation criteria for the translator to achieve equivalence between two different languages during the translation process,but also enable the translator to select the most natural and appropriate translation based on the context,thus allowing the target readers to appreciate the text as the original readers do.