A Translation Report On Snapshots Of A New China: Lifestyle(Excerpts)

This project consists of excerpts from Snapshots of a New China: Lifestyle, which is a collection of selected articles on the Shanghai Daily, edited by Patrick Wallace. The events depicted in this book generally reflect the visage of the “new” China. These include stories of ordinary people, features on public opinion, basic necessities, arts, and culture. The purpose of editing this book is to help foreigners in China understand the obvious aspects of Chinese culture, and serve as their “guide” to assimilating into the Chinese way of life.The original text of this translation project amounts to more than 10000 words. The excerpts, which include chapters 1 and 2, depict typical people, events, and social phenomena. The stories, which are edited into a “guide”, portray common situations that help us to understand the current society of China.To this day, there is no Chinese edition of this book. Perhaps it is because the book was meant for foreign readers. If people aren’t too concerned about social news, they might hardly know the stories in this book. Although it is a “guide” for foreign readers, it is still a readable book to Chinese people.In order to translate the text well, the translator requires the aid of some dictionaries, especially the online dictionary, because there are many modern developments in language and society. This translation practice adopts Eugene A. Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory, which predicates several basic translation methods including literal translation, liberal translation, conversion, omission, and amplification.