A Report On Translation Of An Excerpt From Spiritual And Ritual:the Morse Collection Of Ancient Chinese Art

The translation practice report consists of four parts: task description,process description,case analysis,and self-summary,intending to describe the problems and solutions in the translation process.The first part mainly describes the translation material,the Spiritual and Ritual: The Morse Collection of Ancient Chinese Art,co-authored by the American scholar Robert L.Thorp and his student Virginia Bower.The book is the recordation of an exhibition of ancient Chinese art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,which can help understand the history and art of China,and enhance national self-confidence.The second part focuses on the process of translation,including pre-translation preparation of translation tools and cultural relics knowledge,key description of some translation difficulties and subsequent modification and embellishment.The third part case analysis is the crucial part of this report.The translator classifies the problems by vocabulary,sentence,and discourse,and analyzes the difficulties and solutions with some specific examples.The case analyses involve the conversion of Wade-Giles romanization into Chinese characters,for example,the translation of bronze vessels' names such as chia,kuei,ting,lei and names of places such as feng-hsi and fu-feng.Background knowledge acquiring and integrating in the translation of bronze's motifs such as boss and disks motifs are also involved.As for the sentence aspect,there are case analyses of inanimate-subjects sentences,appositive clause sentences,long sentences and complicated sentences,and the discourse part mainly involves style transition and contextual connection.The last part is the self-summary of the whole translation practice process.Through the translation practice,the translator found it important to lay a solid foundation of basic language skills.Being short of cultural relics and history knowledge,inefficient using of network resources and translation tools are also main reasons leading to poor quality translation.In the future,the translator will make clear direction and work hard to acquire more knowledge and improve translation competence in order to become a more qualified translator.