A Report On The C-E Translation Of Ethnic Folklore Tourism In Western China(Chapter 1:Overview Of Folklore)

This report is based on the first chapter of the book Ethnic Folklore Tourism in Western China,which contains three parts: the concept and categories of folklore,the basic characteristics and social functions of folklore,and the origin,development and evolution of Chinese folklore.It belongs to an informative text.By choosing this type of text about folklore as the translation task,the translator hoped to further analyze and study the translation involving the contents of the folk culture.Guided by the Skopos theory proposed by German linguist Vermeer,this report aimed to better convey text information and folk culture.On the basis of the three principles of Skopos theory,the translator analyzed the difficulties in the process of Chinese-English translation and some appropriate translation methods and techniques were used to solve them.The translator analyzed and studied the source text in three aspects: lexical level,syntactic level and discourse level.The source text involves folk culture.It includes many culture-loaded words,four-character structures,proverbs,and complex sentences,and so on,which increases the difficulty of the translation task.Therefore,lots of preparations before translation have been made,such as understanding the source text,looking up the background information of source text,using necessary translation tools and resources,selecting parallel text related to folklore and making a glossary of terms.In the case analysis,the translator used some translation methods and techniques,such as literal translation,addition,omission,conversion,recasting and inversion,making the translation faithful and smooth.Through this translation practice,some conclusions are as follows: Skopos theory can be used to guide the translation of some texts involving folk culture in the future.Some appropriate translation methods and techniques should be selected to solve problems facing in the translation and better deliver cultural information according to specific situation.The following are specific descriptions: literal translation or literal translation plus annotation was used to deal with some culture-loaded words and four-character structures related to folk culture in the source text,to better convey cultural information;some translation techniques,such as conversion,recasting or inversion,were adopted to deal with some complex sentences to enhance the readability;the omission was applied to remove the redundant and repeated parts,making the translation conform to the habits of target language.In short,the translator has improved his practical ability and accumulated the translation experience on folk texts after this translation task.However,in terms of theoretical application,there were some obvious deficiencies.In the later practice,the translator needs to strengthen the learning and conduct in-depth research.