A Report On C-E Translation Of Chinese Folk Culture

With the development of the economy, China has a greater impact in the global community, resulting in an increasing demand for the better understanding of China and its culture. Folk culture, the unifying expressive components of everyday life as enacted by localized, tradition-bound groups, is the most essential part of Chinese culture. As one of the most important ways for the global community to know the Chinese culture, the introduction and translation of Chinese folk culture plays a crucial role in demonstrating and spreading the fine Chinese cultural heritage. Shaanxi, due to its geographical locations and historical function, has created unique and diverse representative folk culture, thus the introduction of Shaanxi folk culture takes an important part of the introduction of Chinese folk culture. However, there are not sufficient English versions of the introduction of Chinese local folk culture currently. Under the circumstance, the author was assigned a practice on the C-E translation of Chinese folk culture and made a report on the practice. The practice comes from two sources: first, the course practice of the Chinese culture-related materials; second, two volumes of the national-level publication Directory of Shaanxi Intangible Cultural Heritage(six volumes): Traditional Technologies and Arts and Folk Customs, which were published in 2015 by Xi’an Branch of World Publishing Cooperation.Guided by cultural translation theory and communicative translation theory, the practice tries to find out the problems and effective translation strategies in the folk culture translation, with the purpose of effectively spreading Chinese folk culture and providing reference for improvement for future translation of the author. The author summarized the major difficulties as cultural defaults which include semantic differences, cultural default, and context default. For each kind of difficulty, the author meanwhile offered correspondent translation strategies as literal translation and interpretation, substitution, explanation, transliteration and annotation, contextual amplification, etc, which obtained excellent translation results.