Translation Strategies Of Back Translation

This paper is a report of a translation project. The original text of the translation project is Flowers in the Mirror, Moonlight on the Water:Images of a Deluded Mind, which is a novel review written by a scholar of the University of Aarhus named Lene Bech in2002. It is a comment on A Dream of Red Mansions, and is included in JSTOR.The purpose of this essay is to explore the role played by the girls in the descriptions of Baoyu’s spiritual progress in the narrative. By means of the girls’s association with images of flowers and of the moon it will be shown how they function as symbolic representations of stages in Baoyu’s progress.The original text is written in English. The author may read A Dream of Red Mansions in its original form or its English version. In his work, Proper Nouns, concepts and terminology, direct speech and indirect description are presented in their English forms. In the process of English-Chinese translation, we need to restore the English cultural images to its original Chinese form, the process of which is called back translation. The main content of the report is divided into four chapters:Chapter One is task description, which includes text background, task requirement; Chapter Two is task process, which includes preparation before translation, process control, summary after translation; Chapter Three is case study, which mainly consists of two parts, the first part introduces the concept and definition of back translation, in the second part, by combining the original text with translation process, a detailed analysis of three types of back translation is made:back translation of Proper Nouns, concepts and terminology, direct speech and indirect description; Chapter Four is practice summary, through the analysis in Chapter Three, different translation strategies for different types of back translation are summarized. Back translation of Proper Nouns should be carried out on the principle of convention and unity; back translation of concepts and terminology should be carried out on the principle of tracing origins; back translation of direct speech should quote the sentences in A Dream of Red Mansions cited by the author, and for indirect description, it should follow the principle of domesticating translation. This translation process is studied so as to guide later translation practice.