A Report On The Chinese Translation Of China:the Long-Lived Empire (Chapters 1-7)

China:Long-lived Empire, published in New York in 1899 and 1990, is a travelogue written by a female explorer, whose name is Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore. She came to China and travelled almost the whole empire, from the north to the south. Along the journey, she was be intoxicated by China's wonderful scenery, moved by the coolies'hard life, and astonished by imperial family's luxuriousness. In order to memory her journey and share with others, she wrote all of those into a book.The translator mainly translated from the first chapter to the seventh chapter, which was about 20,000 words in total. In this part, the author travelled in north China, including Chihli, Tientsin, Shanhaikwan and Peking. She spent more efforts in describing Peking, such as Peking people's clothes, traffic condition, daily life, geographic environment and so on.This report is guided by Eugene Nida's communicative translation strategy, the second developing stage of his translation theory. In his theory, Nida called for "the closest natural" translation work. In order to ensure the faithfulness and fluency of the translation version, the translator took advantage of various translation techniques. The aim of this report is to probe and conclude the translation strategy on this kind of literary works, and hope that it will give some benefits to those who have interests in travelogue translation.