| Shi Ji played such a significant role in Chinese classics translation. Under the background that more and more Chinese classics were introduced to the English-speaking world, analysising adequacy of terms in classics, and proposing a more comprehensive set of pairs in term translations are also of great importance. Because of the complexity of term translations, it is a challenge work to translate Chinese classics. The current situation of term translations are:difficulty of term translations, the present translation versions vary considerably, and discrepancies of adequacy for translation pairs. So in term translation studies, adequacy acts as the basis for Chinese classics translation studies.This paper is developed based on the official titles in Pre-Han official institutions. Three versions (Burton Watson、William H. Nienhauser,Jr. and Yang Hsien-yi) of translations for the Pre-Han official titles in Shi Ji were selected as research corpus. Official titles are put into3groups:central government official titles, county official titles and ranks of nobility. The analysis is carried out under the framework of source-text oriented adequacy, together with meaning and equivalence, adequacy of translation will be influenced by synchronic meaning, diachronic meaning, translator’s interpretation, and stylistic differences, at the same time, Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus(BNC) are used as referential corpora for word frequency, Charles O. Hucker’s a dictionary of official titles in imperial China are also used as reference books to check the translation adequacy. Based on these points, official titles from three translators are discussed and analyzed, with the aim of identifying the adequacy of each official title.This paper is mainly divided into six chapters. The first chapter introduces the brief idea of whole paper. The second chapter reviews the adequacy in translation. The third chapter reviews the definition of terms and translation of terms. The fourth chapter presents the adequacy discrepancies among translations for Pre-Han official titles in Shi Ji. The fifth chapter analyzes the adequacy discrepancies among translations for Pre-Han official titles in Shi Ji. The last chapter is the conclusion. This paper evaluates and identifies adequacy of each official title in Pre-Han period from meaning and equivalence aspects, with the aim of providing readers reference for translations of official titles. |
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