On Back Translation Of Travel Writing In The Early 20^thCentury

Back translation is a special translation phenomenon in which a native narrative written in a non-native language is translated back into the native language.Based on the translation practice of Camps and Trails in China,a English travel writing in the early 20th Century,the report looks into the guidance of back translation strategies from the linguistic and cultural perspectives in five selected chapters related to the Chinese culture and society by analyzing examples when characteristics of the source text are considered.The difficulties of the translation practice lie in how to translate the Chinese cultural elements in the source text back into the context of Chinese culture and how to deal with the images of China and Chinese people.Back translation strategies are needed to guide the translation practice.The source text features plain English and abundant Chinese cultural elements and presents a less-advanced and messy China.Based on that,the report emphasizes the guidance of following back translation strategies:1)ensure a readable and fluent target text to target readers;2)try to represent the culture in the source text as much as possible;3)pay attention to the reading perspective of target readers;4)preserve the foreign perspective of the source text.The back translation here is analyzed from the linguistic and cultural perspectives.The linguistic perspective involves back translation at the lexical level and syntactic level;the cultural perspective consists of complete cultural representation and incomplete cultural representation.Complete cultural representation covers proper nouns,custom,quotations of Chinese classics and implicit cultural elements which are general but with specific connotations in the context of the toarget language.And incomplete cultural representation concerns about how to represent the images of China and the Chinese people.The report also concludes translation techniques applied in this translation practice with specific examples,including annotation,omission,and substitution.