A Report On The Chinese Translation Of White Lotus Rebels And South China Pirates: Crisis And Reform In The Qing Empire(Chapter Three)

The translation materials selected in this report are excerpted from the historical and cultural book White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates:Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire,published by Harvard Press in 2014.The original author is Wang Wensheng,who obtained a master’s degree in world history from Wuhan University and is now an associate professor of the history department at the University of Hawaii,Manoa.The book mainly tells about various crises that China faced during the Qianlong-Jiaqing period.The third chapter(12000 words)introduces the course and characteristics of the piracy crisis in South China in detail,providing reference materials for readers who study China’s maritime history.Based on the three-dimensional transformation principle of eco-translatology theory,this report investigates the challenges of translating historical and cultural texts,as well as the solutions necessary to address these challenges,from the perspectives of linguistics,culture,and communication,as well as specific translation cases.In terms of the language dimension,the author adaptively selects and converts the source text by using some translation strategies,such as conversion of word classes,conversion of voice,and adjustment of sentence structure,so as to make the target text conform to the expression habits of the target language readers.In terms of cultural dimension,based on the similarities and differences between the two languages,the author imitates an antique tone and realizes a cultural back translation so as to embody the cultural connotation of the source text.In the communicative dimension,in order to achieve the communicative purpose,the author emphasizes the adaptive adjustment of the expression structure of the translation and strengthens the four-word expression in the translation.The theory of eco-translatology provides a new perspective for the author’s translation practice and a new way to solve many problems encountered by translators in the process of translation.It is hoped that this report can provide a new theoretical and practical perspective on historical and cultural translation practice and provide some inspiration for historical and cultural translation.