A Report On The Translation Of The Excerpts From Craftsman

Culture is the soul of a nation in its survival and development,and also a critical component of measuring the comprehensive strength of a country.Translating the works carrying Traditional Chinese culture is of great significance in inheriting and disseminating Chinese culture and in promoting Chinese culture to "go global".The report on the translation practice selects the first two chapters of Craftsmen written by Shen Fuyu as the source text.Craftsmen tells' the stories about craftsmen and their fates in Shens' Village—the writer's hometown.With the first person "I" as the protagonist,the non-fiction records what "I" has seen and heard.Shens' village is a large village with a history of more than 600 years.It is home to tens of thousands of people.The craftsmen in the village are a continuation of the past.But with the advent of modernization,the traditional craftsmen and their handicrafts gradually disappeared.So it is particularly important to record the lost or what is about to be lost.The craftsmen in the Shens' village have their own characteristics and different destinies.There are bamboo-strips weaver who taught himself to be a bamboo-strips weaver but had a tragic fate in his old age,the pot repairer who was supposed to be a lord but ended up an idle man,the gardener raising a cat in order to get rid of the bad luck but finally being considered as the murderer of the cat and the weaver who had to accept an arranged marriage when she was young,reluctantly marrying a fool,etc.Such stories are intertwined with each other,showing how a village and people's life changed,demonstrating local customs and depicting a miniature of rural areas in China.Therefore,the most distinctive feature of the non-fiction is the use of colloquialism,especially the application of dialects,which effectively adds strong local flavor to the non-fiction and conveys the culture with local characteristics.But at the same time,these features pose great challenges to the translation.How to accurately convey local culture on the basis of the original text is a difficult problem in the translation.To solve the problem,the translator summarizes and classifies the difficulties.The local distinctive cultures mentioned in the work are building cultures,table manners,naming culture and religious customs,etc.,which can be seen in the villagers' daily life and conversations.To make the solutions to the difficulties more pertinent,the problems are divided into two parts.The first part is how to give expression to the naming culture in the source language,such as appellation and nicknames.The second one is how to translate colloquialism covering folk expressions and vulgarity.Having seriously analyzed the problems,the translator chooses different translation methods including transliteration,replacement,loan translation and transformation.For the purpose of attracting English readers,the translation practice aims to make the translation smooth,fluent and understandable while preserving the features of source language as much as possible.