A Report On The C-E Translation Of A Biography Of Lu Yao(excerpt)

As a common literary genre,biography has the characteristics of faithfulness and literariness.It is not only faithful to the real historical events,reproducing life stories of the characters,but also uses a variety of literary and artistic techniques to show the spirits of the characters,which is of high cultural value.Therefore,the biographical literary translation is of great significance for spreading Chinese culture,consolidating cultural confidence and speeding up Chinese culture “going abroad”.A Biography of Lu Yao written by Hou-fu(pen name of Liang Xiangyang)falls under biographical literature with natural and plain language style,distinctive sentence patterns,rich in northern Shaanxi culture,and supplemented with relevant historical materials.And Lu Yao’s life experience is narrated truthfully in this book.This report takes the first three chapters of the book,Miserable Childhood,I Want to Go to School and the Up and Down Youth,as the research object in Chinese-English translation practice.With the guidance of the Eco-translatology theory put forward by Professor Hu Gengshen,the translation difficulties are analyzed from linguistic dimension,cultural dimension and communicative dimension.For linguistic dimension,the translation difficulties mainly lie in non-subject sentences,run-on sentences and passive sentences at syntactical level,and simile and metaphor at rhetorical level.For cultural dimension,the translation difficulties mainly involve political culture-loaded words,custom culture-loaded words at lexical level.For communicative dimension,the translation difficulties focus on communicative intention and communicative effect.Through the case analysis,the present author discusses the translation strategies adopted after making “adaptation and selection”,so as to achieve ecological balance between source text and target text.Considering the above translation difficulties,the present author adopts the corresponding translation strategies under the guidance of the Eco-translatology theory: 1)In linguistic dimension,amplification,conversion,division,free translation and annotation are adopted to achieve the linguistic ecological balance;2)In cultural dimension,foreignization,amplification,literal translation,annotation,transliteration and annotation are adopted to achieve the cultural ecological balance;3)In communicative dimension,domestication,reconstruction,amplification and free translation method to achieve the cultural ecological balance.It is hoped that the report is able to provide references for literary translation on the basis of this Chinese-English translation practice.