On The "Back-Translation" Strategies In The Translation Of Sinological Academic Texts

The existence and development of overseas sinology reveals the significance of Chinese culture around the globe.For a long time,however,back-translation of overseas sinological texts has been simply regarded as a textual research that trace the historical background or original literatures.To some extent,the fuzziness of the concept limits the development of back translation research.The book Science and the Dao mainly introduce the corresponding concepts of Astrophysics and particle physics through Taoism’s theories and concepts about Heaven,and explain the inseparable relationship between Taoism and Science.In addition,this book is full of technical terms of Taoism involving theology,religion,ethics,philosophy,medicine,literature,art,etc.The logical structure shows progressive characteristics.As for paragraphs and sentences,they don’t quite follow each other in meaning,which especially happen when pronouns,non-finite verbs and appositives are involved.The chapters have a clear concept,strict logic,standard grammar,and distinct conclusions.This study discussed back-translation strategies used in the translation process of chapter one of Science and the Dao by using case analysis,induction and comparison to explore the characteristics of the text,focusing on three difficulties of technical term,information cohesion and linguistic style from the perspectives of language,culture and stylistic feature.On the linguistic level,back-translation strategies like stylistic integration,logical reorganization and word conversion should be adopted and focused;on the cultural level,translation methods of technical terms and adjectives should be discussed,as well as methods of translation notes,preface and domestication to reach a balance of text readability and academic nature,thus making the translation more accurate.As for stylistic feature,classic restoration and a moderate alienation were discussed to demonstrate the influences on translation reading made by different stylistic features.The quality of the transformation of linguistic symbols and cultural elements directly affects the quality of back-translation,we must focus on the dual transformation of language and cultural to deal with this kind of interlingual translation problems.This paper puts forward some ideas and discussions on back-translation of overseas sinological academic texts,it is hoped that this study may contribute to the promotion of back-translation of overseas sinological works and Taoism research in China.