A Report On English Translation Of Huashan Rock Art(Chapter 5)

The source text of this translation practice report is selected from the fifth chapter of Hu Baohua’s Huashan Rock Art,Huashan Rock Art and Bronze Drum Culture.This text introduces the bronze drum patterns in Huashan Rock Art,the evolution history of bronze drums,the spread of Luoyue bronze drums and related folk customs,which is ethnic culture text,involving many ethnic cultures in China.The translation difficulties in this translation practice include the translation of culture-loaded words,the translation of short sentences and long sentences,the translation of active sentences and the cohesion and coherence of texts.Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation was applied in this translation practice.The translator used these two theories flexibly in the process of translation,and discussed how to translate this kind of text from three levels: lexical level,syntactic level and discourse level.Among them,at the lexical level,the translator made case analyses from ecological culture-loaded words,social culture-loaded words and material culture-loaded words respectively;At the syntactic level,the translator made case analyses from short sentences,long sentences,and active sentences;At the discourse level,the translator made case analyses from the cohesion and coherence between sentences.Using these two theories effectively upgraded the quality of the translation and helped the translation achieve better results.The conclusion of this translation practice is that it is feasible and applicable to use semantic translation and communicative translation when translating ethnic cultural texts;These two theories are complementary and inseparable in translation.Through this translation practice,the translator learned to make full preparations before the translation work begins,had a deeper understanding of semantic translation and communicative translation and realized that only by paying attention to any detail in translation can we ensure the overall quality of the translation.At the same time,the translator hopes that this translation practice report can provide some reference for the translation of ethnic cultural texts in the future.