| Since ancient times, art has been playing an important role in cultural exchange between nations. The Chinese-English translation is critical to better introduce Chinese art and its development to the world. Meanwhile, more western art professionals tend to research on Chinese paintings and art history and hence rendered English academic writings. This paper is an effort to back translate such academic writings on Chinese arts from English to Chinese. Art translation abound with cross-cultural expressions at both lexical and syntactic levels calls for a proper translation by all means. Bad art translation not only fails to deliver what works of art try to express, but also confuses its receivers sometimes. In this regard, discussions and exploration about art translation are always necessary for its improvement and development. This present thesis examined back translation in art. taking a PhD dissertation on art Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322)&The Revolution of Elite Culture in Mongol China as the source text.Back Translation is a process in which a text which has been translated into a given language is retranslated into the source language, thus requiring a high accuracy of this retranslating process. This thesis explored the proper methods and strategies of back translation from three aspects, namely, proper names, terminologies and long and difficult sentences. Back translation in proper names and terminology mainly requires two skills:(a) reference-consulting abilities, and some authoritative dictionaries were high recommended in the thesis;(b) searching skills, such as "combination search". On the other hand, in terms of back translation of long and difficult sentences, semantic translation is basically adopted. Translation methods such as paraphrase, amplification, omission, restructuring and division are much needed. Besides, back translation also calls for translator’s awareness of difference between English and Chinese in both linguistic and cultural levels. |
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