Translation Analysis Of Clothing And Accessory Terms In The English Versions Of Shi Ji And Han Shu

In the long process of cultural development, a wealth of historical classics were produced in China. There are a large number of cultural terms in these history books. The terms in Chinese classics carry profound cultural connotations. The translation of historical and cultural classics plays an important role in transmitting Chinese traditional culture to the rest of the world. The translation of terms is one of the indispensable aspects in the translation research of Chinese classics. How to transfer cultural connotations to the target readership is one of the important problems facing translators of Chinese classics.Shi Ji and Han Shu are two important historical books in the Chinese history. They not only have rich historical significance, but also have exerted far-reaching cultural and literary impact on the later generations. Clothing and accessory terms in Shi Ji and Han Shu demonstrate the folk customs and the strict hierarchy and system of etiquette in ancient China.The diversity and complexity of culture bring about the need for flexible translation strategies in dealing with cultural terms in the classics. The corpus of this paper is compiled from the three English translations of Shi Ji by the American Sinologists Burton Watson, William H. Nienhauser, Jr., and the Chinese translator Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang, as well as the two English versions of Han Shu by the American Sinologists Homer H. Dubs and Burton Watson. This paper adopts quantitative analysis method and comparative analysis method to analyze how these four translators translated the clothing and accessory terms in Shi Ji and Han Shu in their respective translations. This paper discovers that the translators all used functional equivalence translation, interpretive translation, fading translation and imitative translation (including literal translation), culture equivalence translation frequently to transfer into English the connotations of clothing and accessory terms in Shi Ji and Han Shu, though they mainly concentrated on imitative translation, functional equivalence translation and interpretive translation.