Annetation In Translating History Text

Translation is a process not only including meaning exchanges between languages, but also including elements such as culture and contexts. In1993, the American philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah proposed "thick translation" theory, which refers to translation that seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context. In his article Thick Translation, Appiah mentioned three theoretical points:knowing the importance of intentions and contexts and paying respect to differences. However, he did not talk about how to achieve "thick translation". Appiah is wise to focus simply on general directions. He only stressed that "thick translation" should be "context-dependent" and translators should devise specific methods by themselves.The first chapter of the book Asia—a Concise History is about ancient west Asia. During the translation process, the translator(the author) met a lot of background information, without expressing them clearly, they may influence readers’ understandings of the original text. The author classified the background information as follows:myths, religion, history, literature, figures, geographical names and others. Based on "thick translation" theory, the author provided annotations for the background information. Methods in this translation practice are explicit annotation and implicit annotation. Explicit annotation includes adding footnotes and in-text annotations, and implicit annotation means adding information to the text directly without any footnotes or in-text annotation brackets. In addition, the author analyzed principles of adding annotations, contents of annotations and verification methods. However, overuse of "thick translation" may induce negative influence such as burden readers’ reading fluency. The author hopes the case analysis can give some revision to "thick translation" theory and some suggestions to other translation practices.