A Report Of English-Chinese Translation On Rising China And Its Postmodern Fate(Prologue To Chapter Three)

This is an English-Chinese translation report,including Prologue and the first three chapters,A MEMORY OF EMPIRE:THE NEW PAST OF OLD CHINA,THE YUAN DYNASTY AND THE PAX MONGOLICA and THE MING DYNASTY AND THE PAX SINICA,which is the translation of academic writing.The author Charles Homer,is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.He has served in the Department of State,taught at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service,and been a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and of the Board of Directors of the U.S.Institute of Peace.His writings have appeared in the "New York Times," the "Wall Street Journal," and the "National Interest."Many historical figures,works,events and references are involved in the original text,with words rigorous and formal,sentences complicated and lengthy,strict logic and rich content covering various writings,opinions from different periods and the author's comments and inspiration.As an academic writing,the translator must do detailed investigation,and convey the information of the original text faithfully and accurately,and stick to the original style characteristics without any tampering during the process of translation.With respect to the borrowing of the special vocabulary,the translator needs to infer and guess the information intention and communicative intention and express them with simple words to reduce the reading difficulties.Besides,the translator need to adjust the sentence structure according to the habit of targeting readers and keep semantic coherence for the different thinking ways between Westerners and Chinese,so that the Chinese scholars and readers can understand the opinions of the author better;what's more,the original text also contains some sensitive political topics,such as the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" after the founding of the People's Republic of China,and the twist road China had adopted and education system defects in Modern society etc..The author offers poignancy opinions and deeply reveals the situation of China at that moment.As for this part,the translator should strictly follow the principle of faithfulness and not objectively alter the original content,aiming to exactly express the author's opinion.The translation quality depends on the degree of convergence with respect to meaning between the original and the targeted text,and the connotation of meaning embodies from semantics,pragmatics and text.This translation report,guided by Relevance-theoretic translation theory,analyzes the difficulties in the translating from ten scoring points of three respects of interlingual association parameters,textual association parameters and overall association parameters,and how to deal with these problems with ostensive-inferential model and the principle of equal inferential distance in translating,referring to the microscopic evaluation modes of translation quality from the perspective of Relevance Theory concluded by He Sanning,to practice the applicability to the translation of academic writings.