On Chinese-English Interpreting Of Cultural Relic Terms In Museum Exhibition

With development of society, the museum exhibition interpreting becomes more andmore important. To meet needs of visitors, many museums offer English commentary orintroduction of exhibit for communication and interpreting. But as one kind of translationof public signs, the translation of cultural relic terms doesn’t have an authoritativetranslation criterion, therefore, it will influence the interpreting to some extent. Theexhibition interpreting of cultural relics is still a rarely researched field in interpreting.From the author’s perspective, this field gets great development potential.The Skopos Theory, proposed by Hans Vermeer in1970s, has significant influence intranslation theory development. The core concept of Skopos Theory is that the purpose oftranslation decides the translation methods and strategies. Exhibition interpreting is atypical interpersonal communication activity of purpose, which is feasible to use SkoposTheory as the support.After analyzing the text material of Exhibition of Yin Dynasty Ruins held by NationalMuseum of China, We get the following conclusions through this research:1) mostChinese cultural relic terms have more than one English translation;2) the Englishinterpreting is full of Chinglish;3) taking the words too literally when interpreting;4) toomuch transliteration. With the guidance of some general rules the paper summarizesinterpreting strategies:1) choose the best if there is more than one translation;2) to copewith literally translation and Chinglish, we can adopt "literal translation and interpretativetranslation";3) if transliteration is generally accepted, then just choose transliteration.Finally, from the interpreting view, the paper suggests that we should cultivate professionalpersons in cultural relic terms interpreting and compile Chinese-English andEnglish-Chinese Dictionary.