A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of "Wartime Chengdu,a Fairyland Of Beauty And Nostalgia In The Eyes Of Xiajiangers"

In general,academic texts contain terminology,formal language and academic ideas.Academic texts on history have rich historical and cultural backgrounds.The translation of such texts thus requires excellent language skills of translators as well as relevant cultural backgrounds,which can help accurately convey the meaning and thoughts of the source text.This report takes "Wartime Chengdu,a fairyland of beauty and nostalgia in the eyes of Xiajiangers" as an example,trying to provide some useful references to the translation of similar texts.Our source text,the history paper "Wartime Chengdu,a fairyland of beauty and nostalgia in the eyes of Xiajiangers",is selected from the 14th issue of the journal Local Culture Research(2019).The translation mainly consists of the body part of the source text,in approximately 13,000 Chinese characters.The report is divided into two parts.The first part provides some reflections on and understanding of the translation practice based on the analysis of specific translation cases,and the second part presents the translation of the selected text.This report adopts the intra-lingual translation theory and thick translation theory as a guide to try to conduct preliminary analysis on the translation strategies and the problems during translating.The source text is both literary and academic,in which different linguistic phenomena manifest distinctive features.The cases are mainly analyzed from three levels,words,sentences and language variants.Their translation strategies are discussed and summarized respectively.For the function words,polysemous words and words with different meanings in ancient and modern times that frequently appear in the half-classical and half-vernacular Chinese,the emphasis of translation should be put on their contextual meaning.For the historical terms,names of persons and places,the translation is mainly guided by different annotation methods.The translation strategy for them is the combination of literal translation and transliteration.It is important to achieve the unity of sentence structure and internal meaning for the translation of sentences with different figures of speech.The translation of elliptical sentences should focus on the supplement of sentence components by amplification.The parallel sentence should be translated into similar sentence patterns by selecting the corresponding parts of speech.The translation of image hosition sentence lies in representing the artistic context of the original text.Translation of the metaphorical sentences should try to represent the original metaphor.The corresponding metaphor and natural expression should be selected.For the a few parts of language variants in the source text,intra-lingual understanding and free translation are the main translation methods.Dialects are so vivid and varied that it is necessary to convey full information and retain their linguistic characteristics in translation.The argots are obscure and special and its translation should be clear and natural.Folklore language is easy to understand and its translation strategy mainly focuses on free translation and amplification,supplemented by the corresponding expressions in the target language.Different linguistic phenomena are unique in their own way.The key to translation is to understand their characteristics and choose translation strategies in line with them so as to achieve the most faithful,appropriate and natural translation.The report is an endeavor to take the translated text as an example to provide some useful suggestions for the translations of similar texts.