A Report On The Translation Of Culture-related Entries In The Oxford Encyclopedia Of African Thought

With the development of economic globalization,cultural communications among and between different regions and countries are of great frequency,so are the exchanges between China and Africa.As one of the birthplaces of human cultures,Africa holds a special place of classicality and representativeness.However,translation works from Africana at home mainly focus on economic and political concerns.This translation report is mainly concentrated on the research of African culture,the description of the translation procedures,the conclusions of translation laws and methods,and analyzations of specific sentences and paragraphs.The author hopes the report could provide some references to the same kind of texts.The translation texts in this report were chosen from The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought which comprehensively reflected African thoughts and introduced philosophy,political theory,religions,historical figures and social movements of Africa.Four entries were chosen from the book,i.e.Benedict Wallet Bambatha Vilakazi,Harry Leakey,Race,and Jazz.The first two entries introduce two cultural figures that represent the leading edge of the African literature racial movements and the religious freedom in the first half of the 20^th century.The last two entries introduce two specific cultural appearances.The former one introduces discussions and judgements of race in Africa from the 19^th century so far,while the latter one describes the process of Jazz which originated from Africa.These four entries reflect multiple aspects of African culture from different dimensions.During the process of the translation,the author noticed that the texts of these four entries evolve many notions,with clear styles,all limited with some given contexts.Also,this kind of texts has many long and complex sentences,and uses different kinds of words.Therefore,it requires the translator to understand their cultural backgrounds and know the features of cultural texts,and carefully translate the texts.The author concluded the typical problems and explored the translation methods and strategies during the process,chose classic sentences and discussed their translation phenomena.The detailed translation methods include Active and Passive,Domestication and Foreignization,Hypotaxis and Parataxis,and Order Changing and Adding New Words,and Combined Translation and Split Translation.Through this translation practice,the author was familiar with the translation methods and strategies of translating African cultural texts.The author hopes the translation and report could provide some references to methods of translating this kind of texts,and could arouse the readers'interests and thoughts of cultural texts about Africa.