A Report On The English Translation Of Hunan Ceramics Ⅱ: Changsha Kiln (Excerpts)

Changsha Kiln,as a prosperous export-oriented porcelain kiln in the Tang Dynasty,has had a profound impact on the ceramic art,economy,and foreign cultural exchanges in China.In the context of “The Belt & Road Initiative” that urges Chinese culture to “go global”,introducing the time-honored Changsha ceramic culture will facilitate the spread of Chinese culture and promote international understanding and appreciation of the traditional Chinese culture.The source text of this translation report is Hunan Ceramics –Changsha Kiln from which “Introduction” and “Chapter Four” are selected.To maximize the functional information,the translation is done under the guidance of Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory.To help the target readers achieve approximately the same feeling as the source readers,the translator should choose translation strategies flexibly according to the original information.Based on this,the key and difficult points are analyzed and the translation experiences in the translation process are summarized from the lexical level,syntactical level and discourse level.In terms of vocabulary,the translation involves a large number of names of cultural relics,dermatoglyphic patterns,and historical words.In order to eliminate the obstacles that the target language readers might encounter when reading and help them to fully understand Chinese culture,such strategies as free translation and transliteration plus annotation are mainly adopted.As for the syntactic level,considering the different characteristics of English and Chinese sentence patterns,the“analysis-transformation-reorganization” procedure is used to sort out the logic of long sentences and reorganize its information,and such techniques as division,ordering and omission are adopted.At the discourse level,the coherence and cohesion of the text are concerned,and such devices as reference,substitution and logical manifestation are used to make the semantic and structural relations compact and complete and information equivalent.By summarizing a series of translation strategies and methods in ceramic texts,this report hopes to provide theoretical and practical references for the translation of similar texts.