A Report On English Translation Of A Brief History Of Academy Culture In Ancient China(Excerpts)

The culture of Chinese academies goes back to ancient times,which is a shining pearl in Chinese history of education.As an influential institute of higher education in ancient China,academy contributes greatly to the inheritance and development of Chinese traditional culture.To translate the works on the culture of Chinese academies can not only spread Chinese traditional culture,but also enhance the international cultural exchanges.This thesis is a translation report based on the monograph A Brief History of Academy Culture in Ancient China written by Zhu Hanmin.This book has four parts,including the cultural function of academies,the development of academies,the system of academies and the spirit of academies.By selecting the chapter of “The history of Chinese Academies” as the translation text,the translation is done under the guidance of Eugene Nida's functional equivalence theory.The selected chapter mainly introduces the history of academies,including a large number of culture-loaded words with distinctive Chinese characteristics,such as academy names,official names and educational terms in ancient China.To help target language readers to eliminate cultural barriers and understand the connotation of Chinese culture and feel the same as the source language reader,we try to avoid using simple transliteration methods but adopt free translation and annotations in the translation process.As there are a lot of classical Chinese sentences in the original text about the academic thought and the ancient academy policies,the translation strategy of amplification and omission are applied.The translation text complements the necessary information and deletes the overlapping information to meet the requirements of the English language convention.Besides,the large quantities of non-subject sentences are replaced in the translation text by using passive voices or adding subjects in accordance with the English ways of expression to promote the understanding and spread of Chinese culture.This report is composed of five parts.The first part is an introduction of the translation project which mainly focuses on the background and importance of the project.The second part is the task description of A Brief History of Academy Culture in Ancient China,with introduction to the author and original text and brief analysis of its linguistic features.The third part is a case study from the perspective of the functional equivalence theory which concentrates on the difficulties in the process of the translation and solutions thereupon.The last part summarizes the experiences and gains,the defects and lessons of this practice.This report gives quite a detailed analysis of the translation contents and translation procedures and tries to summarize the translation strategies and methods for the translation of historical-cultural texts,aiming to give some enlightenment for the translation of similar texts.