Translating Indigenous Concepts In Sinological Social Science Works

This translation project is based on Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China,1860-1930,written by Janice Stockard.It is a sinological social science work,introducing a unique marriage pattern,namely delayed transfer marriage,and a special community of those women that once existed in the Canton Delta.Since the book contains many indigenous concepts alien to people from other regions and cultures,and up to now,there has few researches on such subject,this present paper discusses the translation principles and strategies of indigenous concepts common in sinological social science works.After briefing the background information of indigenous concepts,this paper analyzes how Stockard handles these concepts in her writing.It is found that to preserve local cultural features,Stockard mainly uses strategies of transliteration,literal translation and neologism to create new words and phrases.The paper is inspired to propose that,when translating sinological social science works,translators should aim for aboriginality.To achieve it,the paper further puts forward four translation principles which emphasize nativeness,understandablity,technicality and clarity,and also four translation strategies,namely making glossary to localize indigenous concepts from parallel texts,flexibly back-translating concepts,reasonably modelling concepts on existing expressions,and moderating concepts in an appropriate way.The rationality and validity of the above principles and strategies are proved through examples from the translated text.Besides,this paper also analyzes difficulties caused by the mixture of various sets of Romanization Scheme.To produce a high-quality translated text,this paper makes full use of anthropological textbooks and dictionaries,parallel texts and different Chinese corpus.