| This is a report on a Chinese-English translation practice.The source text is selected from China Mirrored in Characters co-authored by Zhang Sufeng,Song Chunshu and Na Hong.This book was published by Zhonghua Book Company in 2007.No English version of the sixth chapter of this book has been found yet.The translator selects this chapter as the source text that contains 22,050 Chinese characters.From the perspective of Chinese characters,the selected text presents readers with ancient Chinese people’s material and spiritual activities including clothing,eating,housing and transport.The major difficulties encountered in this translation practice are illustrated from both lexical level and syntactic level.The difficulties at lexical level can be classified into three categories: the translation of culture-loaded words,the translation of titles of Chinese classics and choice of words in Chinese-English translation.The following methods are adopted to tackle these problems: transliteration with annotation,explanation,annotated transliteration,free translation and situational context.The difficulties at syntactic level contain the translation of Chinese character 是(shi)sentences,translation of Chinese complex sentences and translation of classical Chinese sentences.These methods adopted include conversion,restructure,amplification and communicative translation.This translation report is expected to provide some reference for translation of the future text related to Chinese characters culture.On the basis of trying to be faithful to the source text,the translator hopes to convey profound cultural connotation embedded in Chinese characters and globalize Chinese characters culture. |
