Translation Practice Report Of Historical Text

In the era of globalization,it is necessary to break down cultural barriers to promote the exchanges and communication between China and the international community so as to further advance global cooperation and development.As a text type which has been already widely used both in China and the West since ancient times,historical literary texts,or historical texts featuring literariness has its special meaning as it is not only highly informative but also instructive.Moreover,it is also an important approach for us to know the past of a country as its content is closely related with a country's rise and fall.But most previous researches on this type of texts mainly focuses on the accurate translation of historical facts,while the translation of literariness has not received due attention.This report is a case study of E-C translation of one of G.M.Trevelyan's most popular works--English Social History,which aims to explore the translation strategies and methods of historical texts featuring literariness under the guidance of Appiah's Thick Translation Theory.With relatively high level of text difficulty and balanced combination of historical facts and literary description,English Social History has its own characteristics that deserve to be studied.Moreover,being the first translation project the author participated in,English Social History means a lot to the author: it not only allows the author to have a view of what a real translation job should be,but also improves the author's translation efficiency and accuracy.Different research methods such as literature research,case study,contrast,summary and exemplification are leveraged.Due to the rich cultural connotations and literary characteristics of the original text,the author adds various kinds of annotations and glosses in translation in order to give an equal expression of the literary beauty of the source content and deliver the author's emotions and intentions to readers.Under the guidance of Appiah's Thick Translation theory,the author analyzes the work in details by lexical,syntactic and textual level,illustrates problems in different dimensions through specific instances,and finds that proper types of annotations or glosses can make the translation smoother and more coherent,and also make it easier for readers to acquire information from the text,especially those metaphoric meanings.However,the application of Thick Translation in historical texts featuring literariness is by no means “adding whatever you want”,the translator must master the resource materials and understand the original writer's intents first.By summarizing different ways the author uses,the thesis hopes to offer some reference to translators of historical texts featuring literariness,give them some inspirations to use more efficient techniques to integrate historical contents and literariness in a balanced way,so as to improve related translations' quality and broaden the scope of current E-C translation studies of this particular text type.