Strategies And Skills Of Contextual Adaptation In Translation Of Academic Works

The report is based on a sinological work entitled Shifting Stories: History,Gossip,and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China,which explores the tale literature of eighth-and ninth-century China to show how the written tales we have today grew out of a fluid culture of hearsay that circulated within elite society.This work employs a profusion of formal yet abstract academic terms and refers to the historical and cultural background of the Tang Dynasty.Meanwhile,it involves relevant academic contents of Tang tales and viewpoints from other books,thus showing strong intertextuality.In the original text,a lot of terms and concepts have strong contextual adaptability,which is manifested in flexible meaning of words and great dependence on context.However,due to the relatively weak adaptability of Chinese context,the exact difficulties lie in the following four aspects such as the equivalence of Chinese and Western academic terms,flexible handling of abstract nouns,exact presentation of culture-related expressions as well as semantic clarification at syntactic level.In the translation of this academic work,it is found that a better understanding of the academic text features and an in-depth analysis of specific contextual meaning can enhance the adaptability of the Chinese context,accurately convey the views in the original text and achieve the purpose of cultural communication.This translation practice is conducted by the context-based semantic clarification and the cultural coordination,sprung from the concept of contextual adaptation proposed by Verschueren and the features of source text of this book.More precisely,the profound and obscure academic concepts can be explained through context-based clarification.Therefore,the sophisticated intertextuality of academic discourse may be presented through the research of relevant historical and cultural background.The translation skills applied to this practice include adaptation of formal expressions,shifting between specification and abstraction,reconstructing logical structure of information layers and cultural transformation.Through the application of a variety of translation skills which fit the adaptability of the Chinese context,the academic views in the original text can be accurately expressed and the readability has been enhanced.