A Practice Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of Jinhua Huotui(Chapters 5-6)

Promoting Chinese culture abroad and enhancing China’s cultural soft power are the focuses of contemporary Chinese cultural development.As one of the specialties of Jinhua City,Zhejiang Province,Jinhua ham is a highly representative item of the local area.Its production process and cooking culture involve a lot of knowledge about science,medical treatment,culture,etc.It is the crystallization of the wisdom of the Chinese working people and has typical Chinese cultural characteristics.This translation report chooses Chapter 5 “Management and Cooking Methods of Jinhua Ham”and Chapter 6 “Celebrities and Jinhua Ham” of Jinhua Huotui as translation materials which not only cover common-sense information but also professional and cultural messages.To narrow the information gap between the source text readers and the target text readers and make the source language culture better integrated into the target text environment,the translator takes advantage of Eco-translatology as the theoretical basis.Under its guidance,the translator needs to first adapt to the translational eco-environment of the original text during the translation,and select and adjust the translation in linguistic dimension,cultural dimension and communicative dimension so that the translation can adapt to the new translational eco-environment.In the process of translation practice,there exist some difficulties and corresponding solutions are proposed.In the linguistic dimension,Jinhua Huotui contains a large number of four-character structures,which is different from English language use.To better deliver the original meaning,the translator focuses on the information transmission instead of the structure.Besides,when dealing with subjectless sentences that are common in the source text,the translator mainly adopts three translation skills—the use of passive voice,imperative sentence and the third person as the subject according to different situations of language use.In the cultural dimension,the text involves many culture-related expressions,especially the names of dishes related to Jinhua ham.In order to clearly describe them,the translator usually demonstrates the actual ingredients and cooking methods directly to avoid cultural misunderstanding.When translating some culture-specific terms,the translator uses phonetic transcription and annotation to convey the cultural connotation according to the context.In the communicative dimension,the text embodies both overt and covert intentions.In translation,the translator must accurately convey the information of the source text and decide whether to clarify the implied information according to the target language environment.The translator completed this translation practice and report under the guidance of Ecotranslatology,providing ideas and methods for the translation of similar themes.It is hoped that this practice can tell a good story of Jinhua ham and promote the international publicity of Jinhua ham culture.