A Report On The Translation Of China:Its State And Prospects(Chapter ?)

This is a project report on the translation of“the Religions of China”,which is Chapter VIII of China:Its State and Prospects,authored by Walter Henry Medhurst in1838.The source text introduces to the West Confucianism,Taoism and Buddhism in terms of their history and state,rites and gods,as well as doctrines and philosophies.Medhurst,as an influential missionary and sinologist of the 19^th century,founded in Shanghai the far-famed“London Missionary Society Press”??????,which organized the translation and publication of many books in both Chinese and English,contributing to the Sino-western cultural exchange in the 19^th century.Within the source text,he presented his observations on China's three dominant ideological systems in detail.Though sometimes with“pride and prejudice”,it reflects Westerners'knowledge and cultural construction of China in the early 19^th century,becoming the first-hand historical data for the research on western sinology and the history of Sino-western cultural exchange.Translation of the source text,therefore,is of much academic significance to scholars of these fields,who may obtain helpful assistance from it.Guided by the functional equivalence theory of Eugene Nida,the translator has solved most of the difficulties within the process of translating this informative text,including Chinese culture-loaded words,citations from Chinese classics,sentences with long attributive and adverbial clauses,mainly by the adoption of transliteration,free translation,division,inversion,conversion,amplification and aid from parallel texts.Last,the experience gained and problems to be resolved are summarized.