A Practice Report On The Translation Of Chinese And Foreign Architecture Styles From The Perspective Of Communicative Context

In recent years, cross-cultural communication has involved all countries and more and more fields including architecture which is a mirror reflecting the history, culture, economy and politics of a country of a certain time. Architecture is one of the symbols of a country to some degree because its aesthetics is able to strike a responsive chord in the hearts of people from different countries and enhance cross-cultural communication as well. The demands for translation of architecture texts are increasing for those reasons.The thesis is a practical report about the translation of a selected text from the book, The Principle and Application of Aesthetics of Architecture. It gives accounts of the translation process and the influences of communicative context on choice making in the process. The thesis is intended to discuss how the communicative context affects the linguistic choice making of the translator at lexical, syntactical and discourse level.The thesis discusses two aspects of communicative context: the social-cultural context of the texts and mental factors of the language users. It analyzes the choice making at lexical, syntactical and discourse levels with respect to the communicative context. A conclusion is drawn at the end of the thesis.At the lexical level, the thesis deals with the translation from three aspects: translation of terms, translation of disyllables and quadrisyllables and transformation of dynamic words into static expressions. Based on the communicative context, the thesis also discusses the choice making process and approaches in translation of the three aspects.At syntactical level, syntactical rules of the texts and habits of language users are compared in the communicative context. The thesis analyzes the approaches to transform Chinese sentences into English ones which conform to the TL rules and conventions.At discourse level, analysis is conducted to see how to transform the ST, which represents holistic, intuitive and convergent features of the communicative context of the SL, into a TT which shows the analytic, logic and divergent communicative context of the TL. Cohesive devices and coherence of the discourse in the practice is the focus of this part.Finally, problems are discussed and reflection on future practice is proposed at the end of the thesis. This practice makes the translator be aware of the problems to a larger degree and provides solutions to solve the problems. It shows the importance of communicative context to the choice making at lexical, syntactical and discourse levels of translation. It also offers some experience to other translators of similar practices.