A Report On The Chinese Translation Of The Early Spread Of Religious Ideas:Especially In The Far East(From Chapter One To Chapter Three)

With around 12000 words in total,the selected material of this report is excerpted from The Early Spread of Religious Ideas: Especially in the Far East by Joseph Edkins,a British missionary and renowned sinologist.At present,there is no Chinese version of this book yet.The selected chapters reflect early religious thoughts in the Middle East and some Chinese religious thoughts through the discussion of the origin of Genesis,monotheism,and the names of God.On the level of lexicon,the source text is related with religious thoughts,so there are many technical terms,for example,foreign words,religious and historical vocabulary.On the level of syntax,the original content contains many complex sentences because this religious book was written by a British missionary.In addition,the passive voice and inanimate subjects are often used in the source text to make it objective and professional.On the level of text,conjunction and reference are two important cohesive devices used to achieve the coherence of the source text.Based on the analysis of original linguistic features above,the author of the current report translated the selected material using Professor Li Changshuan’s “Comprehension,Expression,and Adaptation” framework under the guidance of relevant translation theories.Guided by the CEA framework,this report analyzes the problems encountered by the author during the translation.This report also presents the process of how the author solves those problems according to relevant translation theories.In terms of comprehension,the author utilizes the Internet and books to acquire relevant background knowledge under the guidance of Liu Miqing’s comprehension theory of translation in order to understand the source text appropriately.In terms of expression,the complex sentences also make it hard for the author to convey the meanings of the source text accurately.Those complex sentences cause some problems,such as overforeignized issues.Guided by Liu Miqing’s procedure theory,the difficulties mentioned above are solved in the original context and grammatical structure.In terms of adaptation,considering the acceptability and appreciation of target text readers,the author attempts to make the target text more fluent as well as conforming to the Chinese idiomatic expressions by means of amplification,substitution,conversion,etc.,under the guidance of compensation theory.The author has learned how to translate the unfamiliar source texts throughout this task.She also knows how to apply the theoretical knowledge to practice to further improve the quality of translation.The author hopes that this report can help translators who translate the source texts in the related fields in the future.The author also hopes this report can be a reference for the studies of related fields.