Report On The Translation Of Annals Of The Kingdoms In The East Zhou Dynasty

The Annals of Kingdoms in the East Zhou Dynasty is written by Feng Menglong in the late Ming Dynasty in ancient Chinese, which narrates a long history of China lasting for over 500 years from the West Zhou Dynasty to Qin Dynasty. It records history stories and autobiographies according to the time and finally makes it into a historical novel with a complete structure.As a literal classic written in ancient Chinese which has not been translated into English completely, its systematical translation is of great significance in carrying forward and developing Chinese classical culture. Under the guidance of the professor, five graduate students have participated in the project aiming at translating the book systematically and making preparation for the following study on ancient Chinese-English translation. It costs the team two year to translate the book, among which, the author has translated Chapter 21 to Chapter 34 in a year. This paper is written on the basis of the translation, discussing strategies of ancient Chinese-English translation, aiming at establishing a new ancient Chinese-English translation model.As a literal work written in ancient Chinese, it enjoys all common characteristics of Chinese, for example: allusions, implicit connectives, meaning-driven highly-adoption of nouns and so on. Apart from that, its property of a novel forces it to use proverbs, idioms, euphemisms, allusions and poems widely to increase its readability and interest, which proposes a huge challenge for translators. Translation is the transformation among languages, therefore, as a matter of course, the disparity among different languages is the focus translators should and must pay attention to. During the translation of this historical novel, the author was impressed by the distinct difference between English and Chinese in the respect of hypotaxis and parataxis. How to express the deep meaning of the source language precisely without losing its original flavor is the biggest problem confronting translators.On the basis of the deep structure and surface structure theory of Noam Chomsky’s Transformational-generative Grammar and Back-transformation model put forward by Eugene Nida, the author has established a paratactic language-hypotactic language translation model to guide her translation practice. And in this report, the strategies of ancient Chinese translation are analyzed respectively from lexical level, syntactical level and textual level.