A Report On The Translation Of Great Walls Of Discourse And Other Adventures In Cultural China(Chapter 2)

The source text for translation is Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China, published in 2001, which is an academic monograph written by American scholar Haun Saussy(Su Yuanxi).The book was recommended by the supervisor. The translator, together with her three other classmates, participate in the project. She was responsible of translation of Chapter 2. The chapter illustrates the role of China’s printing technique in the media communication history of the17 th century, especially in the context of the dissemination of western learning, the influential effect of printing taken to the cultural exchange between Jesuit missionary represented by Matteo Ricci and the intellectuals in the late Ming dynasty.This report is based on the translation theories named “translation typology” and “dynamic equivalence” put up by Peter Newmark and Eugene Nida respectively. Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China is of the social-sciences type text, mainly informative and expressive in a small part. In the translation process, equivalence of source and target texts is pursued so as to reproduce the real purpose of the author and the cultural context of the source language in the target language.This translation report consists of five parts: introduction, introduction of source text, translation theory, translation process and difficult point’s analysis, summary.