A Report On The Translation Of The Thirty Great Inventions Of China (Excerpts)

This is a report based on the translation project of the book The Thirty Chinese Great Inventions(excerpts),supported by the National Social Science Fund of China.The English translation of the book is undertaken by a team of 20 members.The author of this report is responsible for translating Gunpowder and Artemisinin of this book.A note should be made that the two chapters,Gunpowder and Artemisinin as historical text of science,contain numerous words and sentences with the features of Chinese culture and scientific terms that may hinder the understanding for target readers in the translation.To tackle this problem,the translator resorts to the strategy in thick translation,for the purpose to narrow the gap between two cultures and bring target readers closer to the text as well as to the Chinese culture.To be more specific,the application of annotation is the main approach in achieving thick translation.This report classifies the annotations from its form into two major types,as in explicit annotation and implicit annotation.They are further sub-categorized based on its content and its methods in the case analysis.This report hopes to shed a light for the future English translation of historical text of science.