| The source text of this translation project is selected from The History of China—Demeanor of Wei and Jin Dynasties.As the 11 th volume in the series of The History of China,this book mainly records some important historical figures and events during Wei and Jin Dynasties.Yi Zhongtian,the writer of the original work,is expert in his concise,lively and humorous writing style.Considering that the historical features of Wei and Jin Dynasties are not so familiar to English readers,the translator chooses that book as the source text for this translation practice,hoping to show the diversity of Chinese culture to the world.As an informative text,the source text’s language features are shown as follows:many buzzwords,culture-loaded words and few hendiadyses at the lexical level.Besides,the author is good at quoting classical Chinese,making thoughtful comments and writing long sentences at the syntactic level.Those linguistic features also are difficulties the translator encounters in translation process.Guided by Catford’s translation shifts theory,the translator carries out this translation practice.Taking cultural communicability and readability of target text into account,the translator chooses domestication as the major translation strategy with foreignization as an auxiliary strategy.The translator referred to many historical documents about the Wei and Jin Dynasties and studied parallel texts of relevant historical cultures to get a more accurate understanding of historical messages.Several translation methods like structure-shift were adopted to solve those difficulties.This translation aims to restore the historical features of the Wei and Jin Dynasties to English readers,and at the same time to reproduce the author’s language style on the basis of ensuring its readability.Unfortunately,the translator did not fully reproduce Yi Zhongtian’s unique writing style. |
