A Critical Commentary On Selected E-C Translation Of Chapter 4 Of The Origins Of The World's Mythologies

This translation report is a study and summary of a translation practice project,consisting of two main parts:an English-Chinese translation with 21329 Chinese characters in total and a Critical Commentary.With a total of 10692 English words,the source text(ST)is excerpted from The Fourth Chapter—"The Contributions of Other Sciences:Comparison of Language,Physical Anthropology,Genetics,and Archaeology"—of the book The Origins of the World's Mythologies written by Michael Witzel,the former chair of Sanskrit Department of Harvard University,comparative mythologist and philologist.Focusing on the oldest available texts,Michael Witzel originally works on different kinds of mythologies and the origins of mythologies of different nations from the perspectives of archeology,comparative linguistics,physical anthropology and genetics.This remarkable book is the most ambitious work on mythology since that of Mircea Eliade.This Critical Commentary analyzes the translation difficulties and strategies which comprises four sections.The first section makes a brief introduction to the background and significance of this project;the second introduces the text analysis model,related translation strategies and makes a detailed text analysis of the ST;the third illustrates translation difficulties the translator may come across and how approaches are flexibly adopted in translation practices;the fourth is a summary of this translation project.The project is conducted under the guidance of Translation-oriented Text Analysis Theory put forward by Christiane Nord,the representative of German functionalist.This text analysis model promotes the translator's understanding for the ST and translation skopos.In addition,documentary and instrumental translation are taken as the main strategies during the whole translation process.Under the guidance of Nord's theory,the translator makes a detailed analysis on two levels,lexical and syntactic level.The specific approaches are philological translation,foreignizing translation,reinventing sentence structures,division and so forth.While accurately conveying the information of ST,the translator strives to achieve the communicative function of the target text as much as possible.Moreover,the translator hopes that after the publication of this translation,it would provide valuable reference for mythological studies in China,and could help professional scholars and general readers comprehend the knowledge of Comparative Mythology.At the same time,it could promote the translation on such academic texts in the future as a reference.