A Report On The C-E Translation Of The Clean And Integrity Government Stories Of Jin State (Excerpts) In The Perspective Of Thick Translation Theory

This report is based on the translated text of a concise historical book named The Clean and Integrity Government Stories of Jin State,and the author excerpted five stories from chapters of Integrity-themed,Self-cultivation-themed and Harmony-themed.The book provides a thorough understanding about Jin State’s(bridge five provinces including Shaanxi,Shanxi,Henan,Hebei,Shandong)historical and regional culture during the Spring and Autumn Period.Given that the text involves substantial historical cultural information,it would be bound to bring great difficulties in understanding to the target readers if the author blindly employs the method of literal translation.In view of this,the author tries to take“Thick Translation” theory as a guide to complete this translation task.In 1993,American philosopher and translator Kwame Anthony Appiah proposed Thick Translation,which referred to a mode of translation in which the translator seeks with annotations and glosses to situate the readers into a rich cultural and linguistic context.The use of this method not only brings the target readers back to the historical setting presented by the original text,but also offers readers a good chance to know the related historical background knowledge.In terms of this aspect,this strategy enables the author to make up for the absent cultural information in the context,and then achieve the purpose of accurately convey the original meaning to target readers.To sum up,this theory provides a new way for translating historical and cultural texts.The Clean and Integrity Government Stories of Jin State involves abundant cultural and historical information,such as political figures,geographical names,official titles,and so forth,which requires the translator to search and page through as many books as possible to equip with enough historical and cultural knowledge.In the process of translation,the authortook Thick Translation theory as a guide,and adopted the method of adding footnotes,in-text annotations and covert annotations to convey the cultural-loaded background information,so as to better present the culture of clean government during the Spring and Autumn Period.The author hopes that this translation practice can provide some references for the relevant historical text translation in the future.