A Translation Project Report Of Chinese Thinking Modes(chapter Twenty And Chapter Twenty-one) By Wu Chun

The book Chinese Thinking Modes is written by Wu Chun as a doctoral dissertation from Department of Philosophy of Shanghai Normal University. This book is made up of twenty-two chapters with a basic standpoint of features of Chinese thinking mode, added by elaborated comparison with that of ancient Greek profoundly and systematically. On account of detailed content and professionally scientific narration, the book has won the third award of the Outstanding Achievements Philosophy and Social Science of Shanghai. This project has been made of two excerpts from this book: Chapter 20 Analysis and Synthesis and Chapter21 Conceptual System; the former focuses on form, content and causes of synthetic thinking, and makes a conclusion that Chinese thinking develops along the way of phyletic accuracy while Greek thinking, the way of structural precision through the comparison with ancient Greek thinking mode; the latter stresses on the exploration of relationships between concept and reality, attributes, connotation, describes conditions of Greek concept as a comparison and concludes that the concepts of both nations have their owns superiorities and deficiencies, and suggests that we should hold objective and fair attributes to them to avoid one-sided evaluations.This project, by reason of strict nature of social science and profundity and profession of phraseology, is confronted with many translation difficulties, such as translation measures of numerous philosophic terms involving “species analysis”,“interpreted analytic thinking”, “per genus et differentiam”, etc.; plenty of quotations from ancient books including The Nine Situations of Military Science of Sun Zi, The Medical Classic of Yellow Emperor, Xun-zi, etc. which are written abstrusely make itharder to translate them correctly; there are quantities of statements or expressions in the original book which are written in loose structures without necessary cohesion and semantic repetition by the reason of different thinking habits between Chinese and English, that is, Chinese is a parataxic language with spiral way of thinking while English, hypotaxic and think things linearly, which is a difficult points as translation. Based on above difficulties, translation theories involving Vermeer’s Skopos theory of translation strategies, Eugene Nida’s Functional Equivalence theory and Reiss’ text types and translation theory are used as theoretical basis guiding the application of translation strategies including literal translation and free translation,methods of adding and omitting, etc., in this project report in order to produce a more appropriate English version.In general, this report is divided into four parts: Part One is an introduction to the translation report covering its background, its significance and overall layouts. Part Two consists of the text analysis and the applied theory, so a brief of the author and the main idea of this book will never be excluded. Part Three elaborates difficulties and methods of translation. Such difficulties as diversion between cultures, the technical terms in great numbers,demanding translation of lines in classic Chinese and translation of long sentences,which even challenges to our understanding ability will be eased by various methods in specific examples. Part Four falls to the conclusion, including inspirations and lessons from the project as well as problems to be solved.