A Report On The E-C Translation Of Translating Chinese Tradition And Teaching Tangut Culture(Excerpts) Predicated On Prototype Theory And Construal

This report is derived from a E-C translation practice.The ST in this report comes from the first chapter of Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture authored by Imre Galambos.The book is a monograph focusing on Tangut studies,subordinate to humanities and social sciences.The first chapter mainly introduces the discovery of Khara-Khoto and its significance for Tangut studies.Accordingly,many descriptions of the history of Khara-khoto and relevant comments from Galambos are therein involved.For translation of academic literature,rigorousness and accuracy is the priority for the translator.In order to reach such requirements,the translator applied the combination of prototype theory and cognitive grammar(construal)to this translation practice.Predicated on prototype theory,the translator located superordinate categories,basic-level categories and subordinate categories in the ST.Consequently,the translator realized transfer of categories between English and Chinese through hyponym,hypernym,literal translation,transliteration,etc.Predicated on construal,the translator located the four dimensions of the ST,namely specificity,focusing,prominence and perspective,in order to access the lexical meaning and constructional meaning of the ST,and accordingly generated the expressions in Chinese that maximally and semantically equal the ST.This report verifies that prototype theory and construal,as parts of cognitive linguistics,conduce to the understanding of source text and translation from a cognitive perspective and as well contribute to justify the decisions on translation skills or strategies.Additionally,the author hopes that this report could be a reference for translation practice,translation studies and relevant linguistic research.