A Chinese-English Translation Practice Report On Charming Jinxiu (Excerpted)

Integral to Chinese cultures,cultures of ethnic groups are of equal priority.To conduct a C-E translation of Chinese ethnic cultures,first and foremost,the translator should form a general understanding of the source culture and a deep comprehension of the source text.What also needs to be taken into account is not only the readability and acceptability of the target text for the target audience but also the purpose of strengthening our cultural confidence and telling Chinese stories well.The source text of this translation practice is the third chapter,Folk Customs,selected from the book Charming Jinxiu,a book from the series My Hometown,Beautiful Guangxi.Elaborating on folk customs of the Yao ethnic group in Jinxiu,the source text consists of three respective sections: Ritual Repaying Panwang,wedding customs,and grand festivals.Written in the form of a translation practice report,this report focuses on the translation of the third chapter to conduct case analyses on the translation of customs of the Yao ethnic group.Guided by the theory of thick translation,this report is carried out from three major angles—paying attention to the utterances’ intention,emphasizing contextualization,and respecting cultural differences—of thick translation to respectively discuss the difficulties encountered during this translation practice and provide possible translation strategies as corresponding solutions.In view of paying attention to the utterances’ intention,that is,paying attention to the underlying content that the author tries to express,the report summarizes that translation strategies and skills such as transliteration,literal translation,and free translation can be adopted,which may be supplemented by adding annotations in the forms of footnotes,pictures,etc.to translate culture-loaded words.In view of emphasizing contextualization,the report concludes that the translation may be placed in a rich linguistic and cultural context by means of supplementing cultural background information,intratextual amplification,and paraphrasing.In view of respecting cultural differences,the report concludes that the concepts of unique ethnic cultures involving cultural differences can be annotated from the perspectives of three annotation types,namely,comparative annotations,explanatory annotations,and discovering annotations,so as to lay stress on the culture transmission of Chinese ethnic cultures while paying attention to cultural differences.In the translation of culture,if the addition of annotations,the main means to realize thick translation,combines with the use of different translation strategies and skills,the translation may be able to integrate the utterance with its true intention,restore the context of the discourse,and reconstruct the cultural atmosphere of the source language in the target text.By looking deeper into the application of thick translation to the cultural translation of the Yao ethnic group,this report hopes to supplement the existing cultural translation of the Yao ethnic group,thus promoting the international publicity translation of ethnic cultures.