On The Translation Practice Of Lavis' S "French History"

This report is based on the translation from French to Chinese of an article written by Pierre Nora, L’"Histoire de France" de Lavisse (History of France by Lavisse), which is included in Les Lieux de Memoire (Places of Memory). This three-volume anthology is published between 1984 and 1992 by Pierre Nora, famous historian and editor in France. With the theme of "collective memory", it contains more than one hundred articles of French scholars who describe memorable places and objects in French history, not only concrete, like the Eiffel Tower, but also abstract, such as la Marseillaise. As the main translator and reviser of this article, I participated in the whole process of the translation project. Due to a lack of translation experience, I met a lot of difficulties during the work. But on the other hand, it is also these difficulties that made me think deeper on the important questions concerning the translation and establish progressively my own conception of translation. Thus, the objective of this report is to give an account of the process of translation of the text L’"Histoire de France" de Lavisse, and analyze especially the greatest difficulties and problems encountered during the translation as well as the strategies.This report is divided in four parts:The first part is devoted to the description of the project, including an overview of the project as well as a presentation of the text and the author. Launched by a Professor of the Faculty of History of Nanjing University, this project consists of the translation of eleven articles selected from Les Lieux de Memoire, all of which would be grouped in a collection published by Nanjing University Press. In L’"Histoire de France" de Lavisse, the author explains why and how Lavisse wrote his History of France, and also demonstrates the great contribution of Lavisse and his work.The second part describes in detail the translation process, including the work before and after the translation in a strict sense. In consideration of the length of the text (approximately forty thousand words in Chinese) and the time (10 days for the first draft), the work is assigned to two translators and two revisers.The third part analyses representative examples, showing the greatest difficulties encountered during translation. It also includes a reflection of translation strategies. Because of the differences of languages and cultures, the translator is sometimes obliged to adopt the domesticating strategy. As the smallest unit of language, the word makes sense only in the particular context. This is why the translator has to make a choice between the various meanings of the word and sometimes to catch the implication. Moreover, due to the logical differences, it is necessary to change the parts of speech and even to break the sentence structure to achieve the equivalence of the meaning. As for the translation of idioms, the translator usually needs to follow the criterion of similarity in spirit.The last part acts as the conclusion of this report, including a summary of shortcomings that remain to be made up, for example, the deficiency in searching for documents and foreign resources, the lack of exchanges between two translators, and above all, the limited competence of the translator. But on the other hand, it is through the difficulties that I have accumulated valuable experiences, which benefit the future translation practices.