A Report On The Gains And Losses Of John Blofeld's English Version Of Daguan Cha Lun From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology In Back-translation Method

This translation practice report is based on translating,thinking about and researching on the monograph The Chinese Art of Tea,written by a British sinologist John Blofeld.The author of this report translated the second,third and twelfth chapters of the book.This report focuses on John Blofeld's English version of Daguan Cha Lun(Treatise on Tea),a tea classic in the Song Dynasty,aiming to spread Chinese tea culture so as to accelerate Chinese traditional culture going out to the world.The findings are summarized as follows:From the perspective of linguistic dimension,John Blofeld is inclined to use adjectives,nouns and prepositions to effectively transform the dynamic characteristics of the Chinese language into the static characteristics of English.At the same time,he has taken full account of the reading habits of the target readers and used conjunctions to correspond to the characteristics of English as a more hypotactic language.In addition,he has adopted more passive voice and modal verbs to introduce Chinese tea art techniques faithfully,objectively and vividly.From the perspective of cultural dimension,John Blofeld has tried to maintain the cultural connotation of the source language as much as possible to facilitate target readers' understanding and comprehension by virtue of amplification and annotation.However,in view of his foreign cultural background,some cultural misunderstandings have occurred in his work,which might be the cause of the missing translations and mistranslations in his version.From the perspective of communicative dimension,it has to be pointed that out that John Blofeld has certain subjectivity in the process of spreading Chinese tea culture.For example,he has only chosen to disseminate something he believed to be useful and omitted a lot of technical details in Chinese tea art.This has resulted in the fact that on the one hand,he has strengthened the effective communication with target readers and enhanced the readability and acceptance of the translation;on the other hand,he has failed to give due respect to the original work and its author.As a result,he has only partially reproduced the communicative intention.In translating culture classics,translators should not only have a deep understanding of the historical background,but also show due respect to the original work and its author so as to effectively convey cultural information and achieve communicative intentions.Meanwhile,translators are supposed to take the reading habits and aesthetic expectation of target readersinto consideration and pay attention to the differences between two languages,so as to improve translation quality and spread Chinese tea culture better.