Selected E-C Translation Of Perfect Worlds:Utopian Fiction In China And The West And A Critical Commentary

This critical commentary is an analysis report about the translation strategies and methods taken in the translation of the selected text from English to Chinese, and it comprises four parts:an introduction to the project, theoretical framework, strategies and methods applied in the translation, and a conclusion drawn from the project.This translation project, selected from Perfect worlds:Utopian Fiction in China and the West by Douwe Fokkema consists of two chapters:Chapter 1, Introduction(pp.15-26); Chapter 8, Small scale Socialist Experiments, or "the New Jerusalem in Duodecimo"(pp.195-202). Chapter 1 mainly discusses the origin of Utopian fiction, the distinction between Utopian fiction and dystopian fiction, and the cultural difference between Chinese and European Utopian thinking. At the beginning, guided by four hypotheses in culture crisis, the author introduces the favorable cultural and historical conditions for the writing and reception of Utopian fiction. Then, it portrays people's desire for an ideal Utopian world in the process of secularization. Chapter 8 elaborates Chinese and western writers'further exploration for a better world in the fiction, their efforts to find answers to social problems in the political and intellectual turmoils of the first half of the nineteenth century.The critical commentary firstly presents a brief introduction to the original text, the author and the significance of the project, and then it elaborates on its theoretical framework. Lastly, it comes up with some translation strategies used in concrete examples from the selected text. The project is conducted under the guidance of Eugene A. Nida's Theory of Functional Equivalence, which focuses on "reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style." More specifically, the translation strategies and methods utilized in this project mainly fall into two levels rendered as follows:1) Translation on Lexical Level; 2) Translation on Syntactic Level. And these specific approaches are a) free translation; b) turning English passive voice into Chinese active voice; c) other strategies including using parallel structure, following the original syntactic order, turning phrases into clauses, etc. The last part is a conclusion drawn from the project.The project can be illuminating for those who want to learn about Utopian fiction both in the East and the West as well as its future trend in translating practices. It is hoped this translation will benefit those who are interested in translating more Utopian fiction.