A Report On Chinese To English Translation Of Zhao Shutun

The source text of the translation project is the book Zhao Shuntun which was collated and edited by Die Yan and other scholars, and published by Yunnan People’s Publishing House. The content of this book is a poem about love which is a well-known narrative poem of the Dai people in China. The love story of Zhao Shuntun and Nanmu Nuona is widely spread in Xishuangbanna、Simao、Dehong and some other dwelling areas for the Dai people, even in some southeast Asian countries. In 2008, Zhao Shutun and Nanmu Nuona was listed in the second National Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Moreover, this poem is the first literary work of the Dai ethnic group which has been translated from the Dai language into Chinese. However,the English version of this book has not yet been found till now. The research on C-E translation of Zhao Shutun is still vacant in China. On account of the differences in the aspects of geographic condition, historical background, religions, customs and habits, each ethnic group has its own specific cultural elements. Culture-bound term,as a special cultural symbol,carries a large amount of cultural information which has no equivalents in other languages. The culture-bound terms in the source poem are involved with ecology, material life, custom, habit, religion, linguistic, etc. In light of the cultural translation theory, this paper intends to discuss the problems in translation practice from three aspects, that is, proper nouns and customs, folklores and rhetorical figures. Then, the author analyzes some typical examples and concludes some strategies applied in the translation of culture-bound terms.Nowadays, the study on the C-E translation of the classics of ethnic groups plays an important role in the transmission of minority cultures in the era of multicultural integration. At present, just a few scholars do the relevant study on the C-E translation of the classics of the Dai people. Thus, the translation project will be helpful for exploring the strategies which can be used in the translation of those classics. It will also help to protect the intangible cultural heritage of the Dai people and drive the culture of the Dai people to the world.This project is divided into two parts: Part one is about the original text and the translated text. Part two consists of four chapters. The first chapter is about the significance of the translation task and a brief introduction to the source text. The second chapter is a description of the translation process, including an introduction to the translation theory and a brief summary of the applied strategies. The third chapter is to analyze and discuss the problems and the strategies used in the translation. The last chapter is a conclusion of the whole translation project.