A C-E Translation Report On CSIs In When Heaven Separated From Earth-A Probe Into Chinese Creation Myths(Chapter Ⅳ)

This is a translation report based on the translation of When Heaven Separated from Earth—A Probe into Chinese Creation Myths(开天辟地:中华创世神话考述).In November2019,the translation project of this book,hosted by Prof.Gao Shengbing,was approved by the Chinese Academic Translation Project(CATP)of the National Social Science Fund of China.The translator is assigned to translate Chapter IV,from which an excerpt of a translation text of 11,220 words is taken for the case study of this report.As a monograph on Chinese myths,the book uses formal and specialized language with a clear structure.As it quotes many ancient documents,the book features abundant elements unique to Chinese culture,such as names of places and books,Chinese idioms,classical Chinese and so on.Chapter IV focuses on the relationships between the three major clans in Chinese myths and the Battle of Zhuolu.The translator adopts Aixelá’s translation strategies in dealing with these culture-specific items.Considering the project is established to promote Chinese culture and showcase Chinese academic standards,the translator stays faithful to the original text as much as possible.When applying Aixelá’s strategies,the translator replaces orthographic adaptation with transliteration and adds attenuation.To preserve Chinese cultural elements,limited universalization,naturalization and autonomous creation are deleted.The writer of the report has the following findings.Repetition is adopted in combination with orthographic adaptation and extratextual gloss to reproduce the graphic,phonetic,and semantic information of Chinese characters.For conventional proper nouns,transliteration and extratextual gloss are employed to retain cultural features and demonstrate denotative meanings.Linguistic translation is employed to translate CSIs with pre-established translations,which are normally concepts or terms.Synonymy is adopted to avoid repetition.Absolute universalization is adopted to render the denotation of Chinese idioms or allusions.Deletion is adopted in dealing with redundant information in Chinese and CSIs that are not so relevant to the topics of the book.Attenuation is used to replace CSIs with expressions that are more acceptable to readers.