On The Translation Of Art-historical Writing

This thesis is a translation project report, based on Chapter XVI from Janson’s History of Art(seventh edition) written by American art historian H W Johnson, named The High Renaissance in Italy, 1495-1520. The chapter is about the major artists who acted from 1495 to 1520 and their famous art works. The author introduces the grand Italian Renaissance art to the readers in plain and simple written style. According to the text categorization theory of Newmark, the project report analyzes the translation of the Chapter XVI, determines the strategies of semantic translation and communicative translation, then tries to solve the various problems encountered in the translation process.The whole report includes five parts: the first part is the introduction, including the background, the significance, the objectives and the structure of the project report; the second part is the background of the source text, including a brief introduction to the author and the analysis of the source text; The third part is theoretical framework, including the brief introduction of semantic translation and communicative translation theory, and describe the application of the theory in the translation process; the fourth part puts forward the key points and difficulties of the translation and their solutions. The author gives examples to describe how to solve them from five aspects: term treatment, the words additions, literal and free translation, semantic alternation and sentence structure adjustment; the fifth part is the conclusion, including the experience and enlightenments which are gained in the translation, and the lessons learned.