Report On Chinese-English Museum Text Translation From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Museum is the important pathway for China to show the outside world its profound history and splendid culture. In recently years, China’s booming tourism brings about more and more foreign tourists to visit its museums. There is no denying that the museum texts introducing the cultural relics exhibited in the museums play a significant and indispensable role in disseminating the Chinese culture. Thus, the quality of the museum text translation from Chinese to English has a prominent impact on the effect of communication between China and western countries and China’s image in the world. So on no account can we ignore the practical significance to study the translation of museum texts from Chinese to English(hereafter referred to as “C-E museum text translation”).East Zhejiang Maritime and Folk Museum, is the landmark building for the port city Ningbo and witnesses the history of our national ancient maritime traffic trade and culture of Mazu. This report adopts the interpretation text of East Zhejiang Maritime and Folk Museum as the source text of the translation task and analyzes the museum text features and its translation difficulties based on the previous researches on the C-E museum text translation. Then, Jef Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory was integrated into the practice of C-E museum text translation. From the perspective of the Adaptation Theory, this report probes into the process of C-E museum text translation from the language-internal and language-external factors. Meanwhile, a qualitative analysis is conducted on the concrete examples from the translation practice of the interpretation text from East Zhejiang Maritime and Folk Museum, aiming at explaining the aspects to which the museum text translator adapts and describing the methods employed in the translation practice.The main findings are: during the choice-making process of translating museum text from Chinese to English, translators should adapt not only to target visitors’ linguistic convention, but also to their mental world, social world, and physical world; in the translation process, flexible translation methods can be adopted, such as addition, reconstruction, conversion, free translation, omission and annotation.