A Report On C-E Translation Of Porcelain Painting Papers

This is a report of Chinese-English translation of two papers on Chinese porcelain painting,namely A Comparative Study on the Style of the Court Bird-and-Flower Painting and the Fencai Decoration with Bird-and-Flower Design During the Qing Dynasty and A Comparative Study on the Formal Languages of the Bird-and-Flower Paintings During the Song Dynasty and Modern Fencai Painting.The translation project is entrusted by Ma Li,a lecturer in Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute and fencai painter,during the translator's internship in Yuyi,a translation company.This project is conducted on MemoQ and the translator establishes a glossary and a corpus of porcelain-related texts.As the contents are mainly about painting techniques of China and Western countries,works descriptions,creation ideas and aesthetic appreciation,the two papers are rich in terms,cultural-specific items,adjectives,non-subject and long sentences,being formal and professional.Therefore,the translation project is under the guidance of Gutt's relevance translation theory and Aixelá's translation strategies of cultural-specific items.After initial translation,the translator proofreads the target texts for many times according to the evaluation of ApSIC Xbench and a senior translator.Based on the translation practice,above-mentioned theories and clients' evaluation,the translator found that for common painting techniques and aesthetic perspectives,equivalent English expressions should be applied from parallel texts to increase relevance.As to similar but not the same contents,the previous method also works but notes must be added to explain the differences to avoid cultural confusion and communication failure.With regard to Chinese cultural-specific items,such translation strategies as transliteration,paraphrase,textual gloss,absolute universalization,naturalization can be used to meet different translation purposes according to supratextual parameters,textual parameters,the nature of the culture-specific items and intratextual parameters.In addition,methods of omission,deletion,sentence reconstruction,etc.are helpful in dealing with Chinese writing style and making the translation conform to readers' reading habits so as to save their processing efforts.