A Report On The C-E Translation Of The Wardrobe Of History:The Essence Of Ancient Chinese Costumes(Excerpts)

With the gradual improvement of the soft power of Chinese culture,traditional Chinese costume culture is going abroad and attracting wide attention from people all over the world.Costume culture is a complicated cultural phenomenon with rich connotations,unifying material civilization and spiritual civilization.Therefore,the Chinese-English translation of Chinese traditional costume culture texts is conducive to highlighting Chinese characteristics and enriching China’s image.Emperor’s Mianfu,the first chapter of The Wardrobe of History: The Essence of Ancient Chinese Costumes,is selected as practice texts.This chapter describes the development of the apparel system based on the introduction of mianfu thereby revealing people’s aesthetic tastes,mainstream ideology and cultural concepts at that time.Skopos theory is chosen as the theoretical guidance of the translation.According to the skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule of the Skopos theory,difficulties in the translation practice are analyzed from the perspective of vocabulary and sentence and specific translation methods are adopted to solve the problems.Through this translation practice,the author finds that Chinese culture is so extensive and profound that machine translation cannot completely replace human translation to finish the translation of costume culture texts.Translators should have a deep understanding of the source texts and make full use of online resources and books to supplement the corresponding cultural knowledge.For the English translation of culture-loaded words,translators can employ free translation,transliteration,zero translation and other translation skills and flexible translation techniques such as amplification,omission and conversion to add relevant cultural information or delete repetitive content,taking into account the information transfer and acceptability of translation.For the English translation of complex sentences such as classical Chinese sentences,cryptic sentences and illustration descriptions,translators need to compare differences between English and Chinese.Based on the consideration of reading habits of target language readers,translators should divide and regroup information to make the logic of a sentence flow smoothly and add relevant cultural background information if necessary,achieving coherent and readable translation.