Report On English Translation Of Chapter Twelve In Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi: With Emphasis On The Original Rhetoric Aspect And Its Translation

As China’s communications with other countries in economy, culture, science and technology are prospering, the translation of her culture, especially the traditional Chinese culture, becomes increasingly important. The Chinese culture, extensive and profound, boasts a long history, where the traditional Chinese aesthetic culture constitutes its most splendid part, covering many aspects including religion, art, and literature, and so on. Translating the traditional Chinese aesthetic culture into English is of significance to spreading Chinese culture to the outside world. The scholarly work Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi(A Brief History of Chinese Aesthetic Culture) taps the traditional Chinese aesthetic culture from time immemorial to the ending period of dynastic China, and summarizes its long and productive history. Its English translation will be conducive to disseminating the Chinese aesthetic culture. Up to now, there has been no English translation of it in publication. Therefore, the present translation project is of practical and scholarly significance, and the translation itself is original.This project aims to carry out the English translation of “Wuguang Shise De Zhongtang Fengcai”(Variegated Sights in the Middle Tang Dynasty), the twelfth chapter of the book Zhongguo Shenmei Wenhua Jianshi. The chapter, with more than ten thousand Chinese characters, mainly introduces the aesthetic cultural history in the Middle Tang Dynasty with regard to tea art and poetry. The text, humanistic and scholarly, is not only salient with its academic thought and rigorous presentation of it,but also rich in literariness. Based on her practice of translating the text of the chapter,the translator writes her work report, involving the background and significance of the project, the analysis of the Chinese text, the process of translating, and the difficulty analysis. In the process, the translator treats the rendering of the original rhetoric aspects as a difficult point, concentrates on treating the translated version rhetorically before finalizing it, and devotes a separate chapter to its description and discussion.The translator’s basic English translation strategy is, on the one hand, to retainproperly the value and belief system, theoretical form, frame of thought, and way of expression of the original text, and, on the other hand, to make sure that the English version presents features of the academic prose concerned with the Chinese literature and art so that it can be accurately accepted by the target readership. In her construction of her English version, the translator strives to blend well the foreignization in rendering the original thought and culture, and the domestication by keeping close to the academic English style, pursuing a proper balance between them. In the translating process, on the basis of the distinction between communicative rhetoric and aesthetic rhetoric, the translator discusses the original rhetoric aspects and their translation with examples. The translator tries to inform the English readers of the original rhetoric features in an accessible way to them, aiming at enhancing the acceptability of her English translation of the chapter in the Chinese book.