A Report On The Translation Of Western Translation Theory:From Herodotus To Nietzsche (An Excerpt From Page 149 To 161)

This translation practice is excerpted from Western Translation Theory,mainly introducing five translators' life stories,main works and translation thoughts in the seventeenth century— Jean Chapelain,Joseph Webbe,Suzanne du Begerre,John Denham and Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt.The source text is long with over ten thousand words and the number of its translation approaches twenty thousand.Although the source text is complicated in sentence structures featured by long and complex sentences,posing great challenge to the translation practice,it introduces several translators' translation theory and contains a large amount of cultural knowledge.Therefore,translation of the source text helps us deeply understand western translation history and culture,thus providing guidance for later translation practices.The source text makes an introduction to western translation theory,which generally belongs to a literary text translation.In order to do the translation well,context theory is applied to guide this practice.A simple English saying goes well,“No context,no text”,which stresses the vital role of context played in language,especially in the understanding of the meaning of words,sentences or discourse.Specifically speaking,context theory can be classified into three dimensions,namely,linguistic context,situational context and cultural context.In light of the difficulties in the translation,the translation report aims at analyzing the particular use of translation strategies and methods under the guidance of the three dimensions of context theory mentioned above so that a relatively faithful,smooth and natural translated version would be presented to the targeted readers.