A Report On The Translation Of Great State:China And The World(Chapter 4)

Great State:China and the World is a historical work published by Timothy Brook,a Canadian historian and sinologist.This book elaborates the origin of the development tendency of modern China and exquisitely depicts the relationship between China and the world in details through studying what happened to some important personages at special time nodes in history.All of them are in the context of continuous interactions between China and the world the history from Yuan dynasty to modern China.The most distinctive feature of this book is to probe into the relationship between China and the world by grasping the historical context and picking up many vivid historical stories from intensive and grandiose narration,which adds the enjoyment of reading this book and reduces the difficulties in understanding China.With the advent of this book,it can not only deepen the domestic readers’ comprehensive understanding of Chinese history,but reveal foreign scholars’ conception of history and standpoint towards Chinese culture and history.This report conducts analysis on a great many of cases at lexical and syntactic levels,based on Peter Newmark’s Theory of the Semantic and Communicative Translation.At lexical level,first,the translator adopts idiomatic translation to restore some typical terms of historical events of China.Second,shift is employed in some cases to realize the smoothness of target language because of the differences between Chinese and English,including the part of speech and emotional coloring.Of course,the translator also uses literal approach to mirror the author’s standpoint toward some historical figures and events.But in some other cases,considering the social context of target language,shift was also applied to the same words.What’s more,variation even is applied to some cases to make up the deficiencies of some descriptions in case misunderstanding happened to target readers.At syntactic level,the translator adopts addition to express the original author’s full meaning.And for the sake of the smoothness to the target readers,the translator also uses division,combination,and restructuring.Moreover,shift is also applied to sentences translation due to the structural differences between English and Chinese.This report conducts analysis on a great many of cases to explore the various translation methods and techniques under the guidance of the theory of Semantic and Communicative Translation.The translator hopes this report can be beneficial to the translation of historical texts.