A Report On Translation Of Ancient Sichuan: Treasures From A Lost Civilization (Chapter 4)

According to Halliday, any text is the construct of three metafunctions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Metafunction can act as a tool in the analysis of source text and target text. Whether the three metafunctions be equivalently corresponded in the two languages becomes important evaluation criteria for assessing the quality of the translation. This is a report on Ancient Sichuan, the translator selects Chapter Four to put into translation practice. The book is edited by Professor Robert Bagley in Princeton University; it is a significant book on the archaeology of Sichuan. This report describes the translation process, introduces metafunction theory and studies the theory application in translation practice.This report can be divided into three parts:Part One is the translation task description, including the introduction to source text and its type and characteristics. Part Two is the description of translation process, including preparations before translation and difficulties during translation process. Part Three is case study, this part briefly introduces metafunction theory then set examples to illustrate the application of metafunction theory. Several examples are set to illustrate the detailed difficulties in the process of translation including the application of translation skills. I hope this report can be treated as an example that metafunction is applied in translation practice.