Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Chinese Educational Mission Students(Excerpts)

The book Chinese Educational Mission Students written by Qian Gang and Hu Jingcao narrates the ups and downs experienced by the first group of Chinese government-sent overseas students.This thesis is the Chinese-English translation report based on Chapter Four of the book,and this section is mainly about the efforts made by Li Hung Chang,one of the initiators of China’s first overseas study program,for China’s modernization and the process from the recall of CEM(Chinese Educational Mission)students to the Qing Dynasty’s demise.Chinese Educational Mission Students is reportage,and the main difficulty in translating it lies in the representation of the original style.Liu Miqing believes that,style can be embodied in stylistic markers,and stylistic markers can be divided into formal stylistic markers and non-formal stylistic markers.This report analyzes the formal stylistic markers in the source text and discusses the importance of keeping formal stylistic markers as well as the methods to keep them so as to present as much original style in the target text as possible.The author of this report finds that registerial,lexical,syntactic and textual markers and markers of figures of speech are rather apparent in the source text.Taking advantage of the three code-switching modes contained in the theory of stylistic markers,i.e.corresponding,recasting and decolouring,these markers can be best preserved in the translation: corresponding can be used to keep the stylistic meaning of some of the markers of figures of speech,syntactic markers as well as lexical markers in the source text;recasting can be used to recreate the stylistic meaning of some of the original lexical markers and textual markers;while decolouring can keep the symbolic meaning of some syntactic markers,registerial markers and lexical markers in the source text at the cost of their stylistic meaning when there is no other choice.This report finishes the translation practice under the guidance of the theory of stylistic markers and summarizes how to choose the three code-switching modes to deal with different formal stylistic markers after analyzing the difficulties in the translation practice,which has accomplished a cyclic cognition from theory to practice and then from practice to theory.On the one hand,this report demonstrates the important guiding value of Liu Miqing’s theory of stylistic markers.On the other hand,it can bring inspiration for the translation of similar texts.