A Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Theatre(Chapters 7-12)

The Theatre is a work on the history of world drama,written by J.W.Marriott,which details the production and development of theatre in different countries at different times.The translated material is excerpted from chapters 7 to 12 of The Theatre,about 13,000 words.The excerpted materials mainly describe many playwrights such as Shakespeare,Bacon,Ben Jonson,and their masterpieces,the influence of ancient and modern Puritans on the development of drama,the post-revival English drama,and the development of English drama in the 18 th and19th centuries.Kwame Anthony Appiah’s thick translation theory argues that by placing the text in a rich cultural and contextual context through annotation and corresponding notes,the cultural features of the source language are preserved to a greater extent,which is conducive to promoting the target language readers’ full understanding of and respect for the source language culture.In this translation practice,the source text The Theatre is a historical text,which contains a lot of cultural information such as historical figures,background and geography.Therefore,under the guidance of thick translation theory,the translator conveys the cultural information contained in the source text to the target language readers by adding notes inside and outside the text,so that they can better understand and appreciate the content of the source text.The translator will also analyze how to apply Appiah’s thick translation theory to guide the translation problems encountered in the translation process from both explicit and implicit perspectives and with specific cases.The current research on the Chinese translation of English historical texts with high literary value is relatively limited,the discussion on the selection of textual objects and translation problems is still narrow,and the solutions are not systematic and comprehensive.Therefore,the translator hopes to summarize a series of methods that have some general practical significance in translating such texts based on the study of this case text under the guidance of thick translation theory,and to provide a broader vision for the study of Chinese translation of historical text contents.