Report On The Chinese To English Translation Of Venues Of Art Space In Chengdu,2019

Art is the precious wealth shared by all human beings.With the development of “The Belt and Road Initiative”,cultural exchanges between China and other countries have been increasing day by day.The translation of Chengdu art texts will help Chengdu art go global and be understood by friends from abroad.This report is based on the Chinese-English translation work of a guidebook called Venues of Art Space in Chengdu,2019.The guidebook includes 138 art venues,the ones open to the public and the ones closed,and the current situations of each of them are briefly introduced in this guidebook.The guidebook consists of 14,393 Chinese characters,which should be translated and revised within two months.This report reviews the whole translation process,describes the obstacles encountered and analyzes the translation strategies and ways adopted in the work under the guidance of Relevance Theory.Relevance Theory believes that the readers have to infer the intentions and implications of the text or the writer based on their cognition and existing context.While in translation,the translator needs to reduce the processing effort of the reader by firstly understand the original text,then increasing the contextual effects of the text according to the cognitive environment of the target readers in order to achieve optimal relevance.Some cases are selected from the translation task and they are analyzed on either lexical or syntactical level,and the difficulties as well as the translation strategies are also discussed.The report mainly focuses on the translation of the names of some art space,words and phrases with artistic features,Chinese run-on sentences as well as multiple attributes.The report came to the conclusion that it is essential for the translator to truly understand the literal meanings and implications and to convey them in the translation work on lexical level.On syntactical level,the key point to deal with Chinese run-on sentences is to pinpoint the corresponding subject of each clause;the proper way to handle multiple attributes is to convert them into non-finite verbs,prepositional phrase and attributive clauses and place them in an appropriate order to achieve optimal relevance.This report shares translation experience and some insights into an art book under the guidance of Relevance Theory,and hopefully,it would be valuable to translation works and helpful for translators in related fields.