Representation And Communication Of Regional Culture

The essay is a research report on English translation of the Legends of Motianling Ridge. As a collection of folk tales wide spread in Qingdao, the book is complied by Liu Haojun and was published by Yellow River Press in2010, which plays an important role in promoting the inheritance of folk tales in Qingdao and regional culture as well as the intercultural communication. Therefore, the C-E translation of the Legends of Motianling Ridge bears great significance that it may further improve the cultural accumulation and soft power of Qingdao and sharpen Qingdao’s competitive edge in international economy. What’s more, this book may be published in Chinese-English version in the future to propagandize the culture in Qingdao.Legends of Motianling Ridge belongs to oral literature with distinct characteristics in words and expressions, which requests that translator should exercise the Text typology and Skopos theory flexibly that the target text can maintain both all the information and the features of language and culture in source text to achieve the representation and communication of regional culture and fulfill the purpose of intercultural communication.The essay consists of six parts, including Foreword, Project overview, Text typology and Skopos theory, Translation strategies, Translation conclusion and Afterword. In Chapter One (Project overview), the essay introduces the general information as well as significance of the translation project, and analyses the characteristics of it. In Chapter Two, the author makes an introduction to Text typology and Skopos theory. In Chapter Three, taking the difficult problems met in translation as examples, the essay mainly analyses the proper translation methods and strategies of proper nouns, Chinese folklore and poems (including riddles), and then tries to probe into how to achieve the representation and communication of regional culture in translation. While in Chapter Four, the author reviews the whole process of the translation, such as preparation before the translation and the instruments used during the translation, and sums up the shortage of the author as a translator. In Afterword, the essay summarizes that in order to realize representation of regional culture and natural intercultural communication, a translator should adopt appropriate translation strategy flexibly according to different text types with the guidance of Text typology and Skopos theory. As for the proper nouns and folkloric terms, the author prefers literal translation or transliteration and make exploitation in text or add note after text when the nouns and terms contain allusions, so that the reader of target text can fully understand what the proper nouns and folkloric terms mean. While for poems and riddles, the author proposes to translate poems with poems to preserve the beauties in sound, form and artistic conception of Chinese poems. And only with these translation strategies, the translation can finally realize the representation of regional culture and intercultural communication.