A Report On Translation Of General Knowledge Of Ancient Chinese Culture(Excerpts)

With the establishment and development of multicultural global village, the output of Chinese culture plays a prominent role to expand China's international influence and improve her comprehensive competitiveness. This requires the cultural confidence which largely derives from the inheritance and promotion of its traditional culture. Against this backdrop, translation of Chinese traditional cultural texts is an important way to strengthen cultural exchange and transmission, so the quality of translation will have a direct effect on the output and overseas publicity of Chinese traditional culture.This thesis is a translation report on the basis of General Knowledge of Ancient Chinese Culture. It selects the two chapters of “Officialdom” and “Imperial Examination” as translation text and preliminarily discusses the translation skills and strategies for ancient Chinese traditional culture under the guidance of the German linguist Hans Vermeer's skopos theory, sticking to its own characteristics of cultural texts. The selected chapters in this translation practice which mainly introduce the development of officialdom and imperial examination in ancient China, include a large number of culture-loaded words that basically have no corresponding expressions in English, such as the official terminology and proper nouns associated with Chinese history. In light of the ultimate principle, skopos rule, that translations should keep the cultural connotation of the original text for maximum effect, such strategies as annotated translation, liberal translation and annotated liberal translation as well as the combination of foreignization with domestication are applied in the report to solve the problems of semantic vacancy and lexical gap. The loose sentence structures and large quantities of non-subject sentences of the original text are replaced in the translation text by added subjects, passive sentences and existential sentences to effectively transfer the cultural information of the original text and realize the goal of cultural transmission and output.The report consists of four parts. The first part is project translation, mainly illustrating the background and significance as well as the major contents of this translation project. As for the second part, it is the process description that includes translation preparation, problems in translation process and proofreading. The third part is case analyses that focus on the translation strategies and methods targeting at important and difficult points in the process of translation under the guidance of skopos theory. The last part summarizes all the experience, lessons and enlightenment as well as problems and defects in this translation practice.Based on the translation process and the analyses of the cases in the translation practice, this report aims to summarize some strategies and methods for the translation of Chinese ancient culture, especially official culture, hoping to provide some references for translation and research of similar cultural texts.