A Report On The E-C Translation Of Anson Burlingame And The First Chinese Mission To Foreign Powers(Excerpt)

This translation practice report is based on the third chapter of Anson Burlingame and the First Chinese Mission to Foreign Powers,which tells how Anson Burlingame led the Chinese mission to visit 11 countries in America and Europe and made efforts to build China’s diplomatic power.This book is a historical literature text,which is characterized by its objective language,complex sentence structure and the use of rhetoric.However,due to the differences in logic,thinking patterns and cultural background between English and Chinese,the translator has difficulties both in reconstructing the coherence and retaining the original message.Therefore,by analyzing the source text,this paper mainly discusses how to realize the equivalence between the translation and the original text in terms of coherence effect from three aspects: grammatical coherence,semantic coherence and stylistic coherence.At the level of grammatical coherence,the translator reconstructed it by transforming cohesive devices from four perspectives: reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction.At the level of semantic coherence,the translator first solved the problems of inter-lexical and inter-sentential coherence,and then discussed the implied logical coherence.At the level of stylistic coherence,the translator took qualitative foregrounding and quantitative foregrounding as the breakthrough point,and mainly adopted the method of literal translation to reproduce the artistic style of the original language.It is hoped that this report can provide some enlightenment and reference for relevant translation practice in the future,and provide reference for relevant historical research of Chinese missions abroad.