A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of The Invention Of Africa:Gnosis,Philosophy,and The Order Of Knowledge(Chapter Five)

Recently,China and Africa are working together to promote the building of the China-Africa community with a shared future.Understanding African philosophy is of great significance for understanding the African continent and its people,which will contribute to deepening China-Africa cooperation.The Invention of Africa is one of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20 th Century and is hailed as “a landmark achievement in African studies”.The author V.Y.Mudimbe has made an archaeological study of the discourse construction of African by examining African-related studies in European languages.This translation report is based on the translator’s English-Chinese translation of the fifth chapter,“The Patience of Philosophy” of The Invention of Africa.In this chapter,Mudimbe has explored the thesis of whether there is philosophy in Africa,introduced the development of African philosophy and discussed Kagame’s special contribution to African philosophy.As a philosophical study,the book is an academic text to convey information to readers,so it belongs to the category of informative text.Due to the fact that the philosophical discussion features in rigorous logic,complicated sentences and intensive information,the translator should not only ensure the accuracy of information,but also pay attention to the logical connection to make the translation coherent and smooth.Therefore,cohesion is one of the major concerns of the project.The report adopts the grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion in Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory as the guiding framework and studies specific cases to find out how this translation practice analyzes the grammatical cohesive devices and the lexical cohesive devices in the source text and applies strategies such as reiteration,omission and using alternative word to solve the problems of cohesion in the target text.During the translation process,the translator has noticed that English cohesion is mostly explicit while Chinese cohesion is mostly implicit.In E-C translation,regarding the cohesion of the original text,(1)if the information of the original text can be accurately conveyed by literal translation,the cohesive devices of the source text should be retained;(2)if there is redundancy once literally translated,omit corresponding cohesive expressions or use alternative words;(3)if the literal translation causes ambiguity,strategies such as reiteration and word-adding should be adopted to manifest the cohesion.Therefore,translators should focus on the text and use appropriate translation methods to deal with the cohesion of the original text so as to make the translated text boast structural compactness,semantic accuracy and expressional fluency.