The E-C Translation Report On Vanishing Into Things:Knowledge In Chinese Tradition(Excerpt From Chapter One)

This is an English-Chinese translation report on the book Vanishing into Things:Knowledge in Chinese Tradition,which was written by Barry Allen,a philosophy professor teaching at McMaster University.Confucianism is one of the important doctrines of the pre-Qin scholars which has been exerting an indelible influence on the development of China in both ancient and contemporary society.Confucianism has put forward many concepts on national development and they has made up a concrete ideological system in China and a mainstream of traditional culture in the larger international community.The report chooses a Chinese philosophy work written by a foreign scholar,trying to explore how translation techniques applied helps to achieve the frequency of translation.As a report studying the English-Chinese translation of a philosophy masterpiece,there naturally exist translation difficulties at different levels in the source text.After probing into the representative language characteristics of the original text with various methods,the problems are solved.The specific methods can be summed up as:(1)The exact meaning choosing of philosophic terms after turning to professional dictionaries and adding an annotation when necessary.(2)As for culture-loaded words,back translation is adopted to achieve the acceptability of target readers.(3)Attributive clauses and loose sentences are two special sentence patterns in English,and the report uses sentence breaking and reorganization to make the whole passage more accordant with Chinese expression habits.(4)With regard to the widely used passive sentences,the report applies different Chinese expressions like voice conversion,omission and words changing to make the target text closer to Chinese language features.Finally,the report summarizes the translation difficulties and the methods employed.In brief,the report shows to readers that a qualified translation version is the combination of the full understanding of the original text and proper choosing oftranslation methods.