A Report On Chinese-to-english Translation Of Old Town Of Lijiang(Excerpts)

Old Town of Lijiang is part of the series of Reading Materials on Chinese Cultural and Knowledge(中国文化知识读本).It shows readers the tourist attractions,ethnic architecture,delicious food,delicate crafts and folk customs in Lijiang concisely and vividly.Therefore,the second to seventh chapters of the book which mainly talk about Naxi,are taken as the research text in this translation task.This text belongs to the tourism text.In lexical level,it displays the characteristics of four-word phrases and modifiers to convey information and increase literariness.In rhetorical level,some poems and ancient documents are quoted to support the history of the subjects.In syntactic level,it also shares the common points of Chinese syntax which are the wide use of short sentences and non-theme sentences.In addition to the common features of tourist texts,the original text also contains rich Naxi’s culture,including a large number of proper nouns and Naxi culture-loaded words and expressions.Based on the above features of the original text,the author chooses Christiane Nord’s Skopos Theory as the translation guidance,following the translation strategy of “domestication as the first and foreignization as the second”.Proceeding from the purpose of this translation task and the reading needs of target readers,the author adopts translation methods such as transliteration,annotation,combination,paraphrasing and reorganizing,to solve the problems encountered in translation such as culture-loaded words,proper nouns,poems,classical Chinese and long difficult sentences.This translation task complements the Chinese ethnic culture and provides a reference for translators in the future.At the same time,the target text tries to achieve the goal of minimizing exoticism and disseminating the Chinese ethnic culture.