A Report On The Chinese Translation Of Excerpts From The Great Walk Of China:Travels On Foot From Shanghai To Tibet

Under the context of globalization,cultural exchanges between China and the West have become more and more frequent.It is of great importance to understand how China,a rising power,is viewed by the Culture Other.The image of China portrayed in the documentary literary works by the foreigners will not only help us know our nation better,but also pave the way for us to enhance China's cultural soft power.However,less works of documentary literature about China by English writers have been translated into Chinese.Hence the translation of such works and relevant researches are of vital significance.In view of the situation mentioned above,this report,by fulfilling the English to Chinese translation project entitled The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet,intends to analyze some typical translation problems in documentary literature translation and explore their corresponding translation methods.The writer of the book,Graham Earnshaw,has intense interest in the interaction between China and the West.In the book,he reveals the huge transformation of China today by offering a first-hand depiction of the lives and experiences of local villagers.The translation project covers the first three parts of the book,which are the Preface “The First Step”,Chapter One “Into the Mountain” and Chapter Two “Drinking Games”.These three parts vividly unfold the true picture of Chinese rural life in the early twenty-first century in the eyes of a foreigner.As a piece of documentary literature,the book is both informative and expressive in terms of text typology.Aiming at achieving equivalent effect in the translation,the goal of the translation project is to convey the information and style of the original text accurately and appropriately in order to produce a translation that fully reflects the essence and artistic style of the original.Based on the text type analysis of the original text,various translation methods are adopted with the efforts to solve the typical problems confronted in the process of English-Chinese translation.The methods offour-character structure and conversion of parts of speech are used on the lexical level in order to make the translation more idiomatic and literary;the methods of restructuring and conversion of voice are widely used on the syntactic level due to the differences of syntactic patterns between English and Chinese;the methods of conjunction and lexical cohesion are employed so as to achieve semantic coherence in the Chinese version on the textual level.Doing this translation work of documentary novel is helpful to construct a fast-growing country image which is still less understood to a certain extent.Hopefully,this Chinese translation will help Chinese readers to learn more about China mirrored in the eyes of foreign writers,and eventually eliminate cultural misunderstandings between both parties.Furthermore,the translation practice will shed some light on how to translate documentary literature as it offers some solutions to the typical problems in the process of the translation.