A Report On C-E Translation Of The Excerpts From Hunan Tea Culture

Tea culture,as a part of the typical traditional Chinese culture,has always attracted attention from home and abroad.After thousands of years of development,Chinese tea culture has formed a unique characteristic of its own.Hunan is one of the cradles of Chinese tea culture and occupies an extremely important position in the history.As a means of cultural dissemination and promotion,tea culture translation is conducive to enhancing international cultural exchanges and promoting the Chinese tea culture to the world.This is a report based on the translation of an excerpted part of Hunan Tea Culture,a book of Huxiang Library series.The original text,with twelve chapters,covers the developmental history of Hunan tea,the types of tea sets,tea customs and ceremonies and others.Based on the translation of “Chapter Seven: Hunan Tea Culture”,namely,“A Brief Introduction to Hunan Tea Customs”,this thesis discusses the translation strategies and methods of the informative-cultural texts in the light of Theory of Translation Norms propound by Gideon Toury.As the source text introduces the long history of Hunan tea and its various tea drinking customs,so the translation involves not only abundant culture-loaded terms but also culturally distinctive sentences,all of which the case analyses of this translation report focus on.To be more specific,transliteration with annotation is adopted to translating ancient dynasties,place names;literal translation,amplification and annotation are used to translating ancient people's names;while free translation,omission and conversion to appellations,free translation and obfuscation to the terms about tea customs and four-character phrases.Besides,the translation strategy of domestication and methods of free translation and sentence splitting are used to translating classical Chinese sentences,sentences about tea drinking ways,tea custom and etiquette,as well as ancient poems and historical allusions.In order to achieve the adequacy and acceptability of the translation of informative-cultural text,the translator should not only adopt various translation strategies and methods in a flexible manner to convey accurately the information of the source text,but also take into account the cultural background of the target language readers.In this translation report,through the analysis of the translation process and case analyses,the author summarizes several translation strategies and methods for the informative-cultural text,hoping to provide references for the translation of similar texts.