A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of The Tape Script--"Fan Xinlin’s Talk Show About Teaching Sketch At The Academy Of Art&Design, Tsinghua University(Excerpt)"

The communication and exchanges in the fields of culture, economy, and politics and so onhave occurred more and more frequently all over the world. Therefore, translation plays a veryimportant role in the intercultural communication. The author has had an opportunity toparticipate in a small translation project about an exchange activity in the aspect of painting arts---the Chinese-English translation of the tape script of Fan Xinlin’s talk show about teachingsketch at the Academy of Art&Design, Tsinghua University (Excerpt).This report is based on such a Chinese-English translation project of the tape script ofProfessor Fan`s series of lectures, which are included in a forthcoming book Fan Xinlin’sPainting Collections published by Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House. Entrusted by thepublishing house, the author`s supervisor organized a small team to complete the translationproject. There were five people in the team, namely, the author’s supervisor, an American teacher,the author and two fellow students. The author was honored to be a translator and a “partial”project manager, in charge of coordinating and progress monitoring among the studenttranslators during the project and communicating with the American teacher. Under the guidanceof the supervisor, the three student translators completed the first translation draft of28,915Chinese characters, of which the author was responsible for10,273Chinese characters, within11days.After analyzing the language characteristics of the source text and the functions of the targettext, the author put forward to the basic goals for the translation project and described thepersonnel arrangement and the procedure designs of it in the report according to the features of asmall project. In the process of translation, the translator team paid much attention to the detection and specification of word meanings and the use of synonyms and articles, as well asthe division and integration of sentences in the source text and the conversion between the activeand the passive voice in the target text to make the translation accurate and fluent.As the report reveals, a translator needs to foster a comprehensive understanding of thecross-lingual and cross-cultural communication, to attach great importance to the preparatoryanalysis before translation and the coordination among the team members and to balance thetranslation goals, the customers’ needs, and the demands of target readers. The source text of thistranslation project is a collated tape script recorded live at the talk shows. The author hopes thatthis report offers some references for conducting similar type of translation projects and themanagement of such a small team.