A C-E Translation Report Of The Ancient Capitals And Cities In Chinese History:Difficulties In Dealing With Information Gap Of Historical Texts And Coping Tactics

This report is based on the Chinese-English translation project of the academic work The Ancient Capitals and Cities in Chinese History.The book,as an authoritative systematic academic research achievement,introduces the transformation of ancient capitals and cities in Chinese history.This project selects the eighth chapter of the book: City and Transportation,which is well-cited and clearly elaborates the concepts and views of the relationship between the ancient capital city and transportation.It is of great significance for accelerating the pace of the external dissemination of China’s historical heritage culture.In terms of language style,the language of the historical text is popular and fluent with a fund of classical Chinese.A number of ancient books are cited to prove the philosophy,political conception and cultural characteristics contained in the ancient capitals,such as a large number of abstract geographical and historical cultural special items,classical Chinese,classics and stories.The differences in form,social and cultural characteristics between Chinese and English cause the phenomenon of information gap,which constitute the major difficulty in the translation of this project.In accordance with the excerpted materials,the difficulties of this translation project are divided into:(1)difficulties in dealing with form gap;(2)difficulties in dealing with social-cultural information gap;(3)difficulties in dealing with contextual hypothesis gap.Susan Bassnett proposed that translation is the communication between cultures and the equivalence of the source language and the target language in cultural functions.Guided by Cultural Translation Theory,corresponding coping tactics are put forward:(1)adding conjunctions and conversion are adopted to deal with difficulties in form gap;(2)transliteration plus annotation and paraphrasing are taken to deal with difficulties in social-cultural gap;(3)adding background information and specification are employed to deal with difficulties in contextual hypothesis gap.It is shown that the above tactics effectively solve the translation difficulties in this translation project.The report is expected to provide references for the historical text translation.