A Report On Translating Philosophy Of Chinese Art (Excerpts)

Philosophy of Chinese Art is a literary work written by Zhu Zhirong.This book systematically illustrates the philosophy of art with Chinese characteristics.Art plays an important role in the spiritual life of the Chinese people.The artistic thoughts of the ancient Chinese people embodied their philosophical thinking.This translation report is based on the translation work of part 2 “Wind and Spirit” and part 3 “Interest” of Chapter 4 of this book.Philosophy of Chinese Art contains a large number of culture-specific terms,the exact equivalence of which are difficult to be found in English in terms of meaning and structure.Therefore,it is of great significance to explore some useful methods to translate culture-specific terms.This report summarizes the translation principles in rendering the culture-specific terms,which are retaining the culture information of the original text,conforming to the expressive pattern of the target language,and conforming to the reader's way of thinking.It also summarizes 3 key translation strategies,namely,free translation,transliteration and transliteration plus annotation,as well as other 4 translation strategies including literal translation,literal translation plus annotation,simplification and omission.In this way,the translation can not only convey the cultural information of the original text,but also provide the target readers with the same aesthetic feeling of the source language readers.Taking Philosophy of Chinese Art as a case in point,this paper enlists seven most commonly used strategies in translating culture-specific terms and four ways of adding annotation to the translation as the reference of the cultural background,so as to make a preliminary exploration of the translation of culture-specific terms from the perspective of Susan Bassnett's cultural translation theory.