A Report On The Translation Of The Starting Point And Dead Terminal Of Life

This report is based on The Starting Point and Dead Terminal of Life written by Nan Huaijin,including his writing and the content of tape recording.In the source text,there is much knowledge about Buddhist texts with various linguistic forms,like gathas and poems.It also enjoys great differences between spoken language and writing.The key and difficult point is how to be faithful to the source text and make the readers comprehend.Hence,this report follows the thought of "comprehension,expression,and adaptation" framework to analyze translation problems.Faced with concrete difficulties,formal correspondence and Skopos theory are applied.During translation,comprehension is the key.Firstly,the report focuses on comprehending the source text accurately,especially professional terms,polysemous words and gathas.Secondly,this report strives to represent the source text’s expression by word choice,discourse coherence and ambiguity avoidance.Thirdly,according to Skopos theory,this report adopts addition,omission and flexible translation to achieve adaptation,which helps readers better comprehend the source text and Nan’s writing purpose.This report is a Chinese-to-English translation practice about Buddhist texts.Through this practice,the translator feels the importance of broadening professional knowledge,improving translation ability and applying "comprehension,expression and adaptation" during translation.Meanwhile,the influence of Chinese wisdom to the world is more and more profound.Therefore,Buddhist texts’ inheritance and development in China are bound to deeply affect the Buddhist civilization’s future throughout the world.The translator hopes that this report can provide a reference for international communication of Chinese Buddhism.