Strategies For Textless Back Translation

In the context of Chinese culture going international,works translated from Chinese into English are receiving more and more attention,but we cannot ignore the special significance of back-translated works.Back-translation research has become an increasingly popular topic in translation studies in recent years,but “textless back translation” as a special back-translation phenomenon appears to be little known,and the attention paid to textless back translation works is far from adequate.The research on textless back translation has started late,and there is a lack of attention to this kind of translation as represented by the Chinese translation of Ku Hung-Ming’s works.This thesis attempts to compare two Chinese translation versions of Ku Hung-Ming’s The Spirit of the Chinese People at the lexical,syntactic,and textual levels from the perspective of Toury’s notions of “adequacy” and “acceptability,” and focuses on the translation strategies adopted by different translators in textless back translation and the translators’ choices between adequacy and acceptability.Through this study,it is found that Huang Xingtao and Song Xiaoqing’s translation tends to adopt the principle of acceptability,while Li Chenxi’s translation tends to adopt the principle of adequacy.However,when the translators take into account the need to restore the unique Chinese culture in textless back translation,they will make coordination and compromise between “adequacy” and “acceptability”,and thus adopt a eclectic translation strategy.