A Report On The Translation (C-E) Of Ordainment And Events Of Great Nao

Nord’s translation oriented text analysis is a functional approach which provides translator a systematic way to understand the source text and thus sheds light on decision making in translation process. Combined with this model, this report first analyses relevant intratextual and extextual factors of source text and then gets down to the solutions of typical translation problems in the source text from four aspects: the adding of "author’s account", translating of culture-loaded elements, relaying of style and solution of tenses in Chinese-English translation task.Because the time the author lived in is much different from the one we lived and the passing of time has brought many changes to social and cultural circumstance, which adds more difficulty to the understanding of the original text, in translation it is necessary to have an "author’s account" before the text so that foreign readers can understand better contemporary China instead of taking what story depicts as what China looks like at the moment. On the part of culture-loaded elements, because a great part of the story depicts about rural life and customs, there are many culture-loaded elements in it such as Buddhism related activities, names of monks, names of Buddha and local folk customs. In translation, if these cultural elements are not adequately transferred, foreign readers may fail in perceiving presupposed cultural settings and further miss the theme and beauty of story. On the writing style part, Wang Zengqi distinguishes his language for colloquial, simple and vivid wording and smooth, flowing narration which is a kind of unhurried story telling tone. To represent such vivid depiction, it is important for the translator to get down to the basic subordinate vocabulary of target language and capture the stylistic features from syntactic to contextual level; otherwise the exquisiteness of language in the source text will be impaired and the style also be changed.Besides, the transfer of tenses is also an issue worth discussing. The transfer of tenses requires not only a careful analysis of the development of story but also an investigation of the author’s writing technique employed in developing the story, such as the use of "historical present". Only in this way can the time line be better reconstructed.