A Report On The Translation Of The First Chapter "The Underlying Cause Of The Decline Of Chinese Culture" Of The Cultural History Of China

Following the development of globalization and the improvement of the international status of China,Chinese culture has attracted more and more foreigners who want to learn Chinese and understand Chinese culture.The year 2012 saw the event that Mo Yan won the Nobel Literature Prize,which verifies the fact that Chinese works and Chinese culture have won a lot of oversea readers.Therefore,the translation of Chinese cultural classics is very significant,which can greatly meet the demand of foreign readers and promote the spread of Chinese culture.The material of the translation practice is the first chapter of the material the Cultural History of China written by Professor He Xizhang.Professor He is well known in the field of the research of the Chinese culture.He once served as the Dean of School of Humanity of Huazhong University of Science and Technology for 12 years.He has been teaching the course Introduction to Chinese Culture to various levels of students,from the undergraduate to graduate students for well over 20 years.The handout is used for this course.In the first chapter of the handout,the underlying cause of the decline of Chinese culture,including the decay of creativity,the reduction of inclusiveness and resistance,the collapse of humanity and obstruction of social development is analyzed objectively in detail.This chapter,as the background of the whole material is filled with many metaphors and classical Chinese expressions.Thus,the author chooses this chapter as her translation material,summarizes the difficulties in it and describes the translation strategies employed to overcome those difficulties.In terms of the linguistic features and text style,the author,guided by text typology of German functionalist Katharina Reiss(1923-),illustrates the translation problems related to cultural classics and solutions to these problems.Reiss,influenced by the linguist Carl Buhler in 1934,divides text into four categories: informative text,expressive text,operative text and auto-media text and proposes that every text is not limited to only one function but more than one function,so different text should be translated by different translation strategies to realize their different function.The author,based on the theory,adopts different translation strategies,such as literal translation,free translation,omission,identifying method and adaptive method,to deal with different text types to help the target readers understand the material better.