The Translation Of Cultural Information And Attributive Clauses In Historical Text

This report is based on the translation of Imperial Tombs in Tang China,618-907: The Politics of Paradise Chapter VI to Chapter VIII.Historical and cultural as the text is,it falls into the category of informative text with both narrative and argumentative writing features.The text involves a lot of historical and cultural information when describing the layout and murals of imperial tombs in the Tang dynasty,and complicated structure when discussing the connection between the imperial tombs and the politics at that time.The main problems encountered during the translation process are the translation of cultural information and the translation of attributive clauses.The translator will focus on these two kinds of problems with specific cases.Historical facts must be rigorous and can't be arbitrarily distorted.The translation of historical texts requires the translator to trace the sources and consult relevant Chinese historical works to find corresponding information.For some cultural lacunas,proper compensation needs to be made by adding notes.For the back translation of some historical references,a little deviation of historical information is found and error correction is done by using literal translation and adding footnotes.When dealing with complex attributive clauses,such strategies as pre-modifier,post-modifier,amplification,division and word order have been used according to the different situation.It is hoped that the analysis and summarization of the translation of historical and cultural information translation and attributive clauses in this report will have some referential values to the translation of other similar texts.