On The Translation Of School History Under "Reader's Response Theory"

With the increasingly frequent cultural exchanges around the world,the industrialization of knowledge has become a trend and the cooperation in production,learning and research is no longer confined to one single country.The ranking competition among global schools,poaching of excellent students and the progress of academic industrialization depend not only on their academic achievements,faculty levels and professional strengths,but also on their overall soft power.Therefore,the school history has also served as a factor in attracting foreign investment and students.In this new era,the relevant academic circle should shift their focus from the compilation of school history to the translation effect of such texts so as to blaze a new trail for the translation of domestic school histories.This study aims at exploring the translation of a school history article,“A Brief History to the Evolvement of Suzhou Medical School”,carried in the school newspaper of Soochow University.From its text nature,the article can be classified as school history with the basic function of recording historical facts,and promoting campus culture;from a global perspective,the article is also intended for external publicity.Therefore,when translating such texts,we should consider the cultural differences and target language readers' response and figure out appropriate strategies to deal with the difficulties in translation.In the early 1980 s,Eugene Nida,an American translator,proposed the concept of“Reader's Response Theory”,which holds that translation involves different historical and cultural backgrounds,so the response of the source language readers cannot be the same as that of the target language readers,but a high degree of similar responses can be achieved and translation adequacy is judged by the response of the target language readers.Under the guidance of this theory,this study analyzes the difficult points in naming,sentence patterns and rhetoric while translating this school history text,and adopts the translation strategies of foreignization,interpretation,deletion and sentence adjustment by using specific examples from this text,comparing different version effects in applying different translation methods and consulting some parallel texts.It is hoped that this study can give an impetus into the practice and research of school history translation at home and abroad.