A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of An Ode To Daur People's New Life

In the great process of advancing Chinese culture,the study of minority literature has also become a great upsurge.Daur,as one of China's minorities,holds abounding literary works.The Study of Daur Novels is a representative of Daur literature.Hitherto the book has no English version.Thus,An Ode to Daur People's New Life,one section of The Study of Daur Novels,was chosen as the source text,amounting to 14,438 words.This report belongs to a Chinese-English translation practice report.The translation and this report are completed on the basis of Katharina Reiss' s text typology.The text typology is firstly proposed by Katharina Reiss.She establishes this theory through borrowing the viewpoint of German psychologist Karl Bühler on language function.According to Reiss(2004)there exist four text types,that is informative,expressive,operative and audio-visual type texts.Text typology involves text function,text type and translation methods,which offers the translator a distinct direction to choose the corresponding translation methods and clear implementation standards for translation criticism.The source text,An Ode to Daur People's New Life,possesses two parts.The first is the review part,consisting of the review of Soiyr's novels,and the second is the appended novels part,including two novels of Soiyr.The first part serves the function of conveying the information.The second part expresses the aesthetic and artistic sense.Thus,according to Reiss' s text typology,the first and the second part of An Ode to Daur People's New Life,can be defined as the informative and expressive part respectively.Reiss' s critique of the informative text translation is “in an informative text it guarantees direct and full access to the conceptual content of the SL text”(ibid: 109).In addition,the language dimension of the informative text is logic.Thus,the translator determined to adopt the correctness,the completeness and the logicality as the translation standards of the informative part.And then,Reiss' s opinion of expressive text translation is “in an expressive text,it transmits a direct impression of the artistic form of the conceptual content”(ibid: 109).The language dimension of this text type is aesthetic.Therefore,the translator applied the aesthetic forms and the aesthetic contents as the translation standards of the expressive part,adopting the “identifying” method.It is hoped that the report can attract more attention to the Daur literature,not only the novel but also its prose,poetry,drama,etc.Besides,it is anticipated that this report can provide some references for other people who are interested in Daur literature.