Selected E-C Translation Of The Silk Road:a Very Short Introduction (pp.19-37) And A Critical Commentary

The translation project comprises two parts:selected translation of The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (pp 19-37) and its critical commentary. The author of the book, James A. Millward, is a professor at Georgetown University, whose main research interests are Central Eurasian history and historical geography of ancient China. The Silk Road is a typical case.The selected part has two chapters:Chapter 1, Environment and Empires; Chapter 2, Era of Silk Road Fluorescence. The first chapter is an attempt to dispute an ingrained misconception that exotic goods are what the Silk Road has mainly brought to us, and to reexamine the idea that the Silk Road is not merely a geographic route but an intercontinental network. The second chapter makes a deeper exploration of six eras during its golden age.The critical commentary consists of three sections. The first section makes a brief introduction of the original text, the author and the significance of the project; the second presents its theoretical framework and translation difficulties; the third illustrates how strategies are properly applied in the translation. The project is conducted under the guidance of Eugene A. Nida’s Theory of Functional Equivalence, which aims at "reproducing in the receptor language the closet natural equivalent of the source-language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style" (Nida,2004a). To be more specific, translation strategies and techniques applied in this project principally fall into three levels:1) translation on lexical level; 2) translation on syntactic level; 3) translation on semantic level. The specific approaches at the three levels are free translation, parallel structures, reversing the original syntactic order, amplification, turning phrases into clauses, reinventing sentence structures, contextual translation, etc.In conclusion, the whole process of translation is undoubtedly slow, painstaking but rewarding. It is hoped that this project will open a door to those who are intensely concerned about the past, the present and the future of the Silk Road; meanwhile, it will be of great guidance and reference significance to the similar translation in the future.