Chinese-English Translation Of Historical Documents Based On Linguistic Features

Historical documents serve as the medium for recording and spreading historical data as well as the necessary base in history researches.Accordingly,historical documents are required to be loyal to historical facts,and as objective,professional and precise as possible.Apart from such features,historical documents have also distinguished themselves from others by their historical feature,also the influence of specific period of time posed to relevant historical documents,which is mainly shown in three aspects,namely infrequently used words,phrases and sentence patterns.All the above features of historical documents are incorporated in their linguistic features.Given this,translators should take linguistic features into their consideration in translating historical documents to deliver good-quality translation texts.For the purpose of studying translation of historical documents,this paper specially takes the translation of documents related to the Tokyo Trials as a study case.Generally,the author has encountered great difficulties in the translation project when it comes to how to ensure information in the target texts is true to the original,and how to present the target text in the same style as the original.Actually,these translation difficulties occur when translators don't have a good command of linguistic features embodied in special words,phrases and sentence patterns used in the original texts.Therefore,in this paper,based on the linguistic features,the author analyzes translation of historical documents particularly from three aspects,namely infrequently used words,special phrases and sentence patterns,in the hope of finding failings in the translation project,summarizing strategies for translating historical documents as well as providing reference for the future translation of historical documents.