A Report On The C-E Translation Of An Introduction To Ancient Chinese Zati Poetry(an Excerpt)

As an important part of ancient Chinese literature,Zati poetry is a record of the evolutionary development of the poetic style.Analysis of Zati poetry will be helpful to explore the development of the poetic style and the art of poetry.This Chinese to English translation report is based on the translation of the sixth chapter of“The Development and Formation of Zati Poetry in the Han,Wei and Jin” in An Introduction to Ancient Chinese Zati Poetry.The original text,as a study of Zati poetry in Chinese literary criticism,exhibits a linguistic form that differs from English literary criticism at the lexical,syntactic and textual levels.Therefore,the translation of such work of literary criticism must also take into account the characteristics of both languages.Guided by Eugene Nida’s theory of functional equivalence,this report adopts corresponding translation strategies at the lexical,syntactic and text levels,striving to express the meaning and spirit of the original text.The main difficulties about this translation task include tremendous terminology,complex sentence patterns,and a good deal of long and difficult sentences.Responding to these difficulties,the translator has applied functional equivalence theory during the process,and the following strategies are involved: At the lexical level,for poetic terms,Chinese four-character idioms and other cultural words,the semantic equivalence is largely achieved by adopting the translation approaches such as literal translation and the combination of transliteration and annotation.At the syntactic level,for punctuation,the translator needs to make moderate adjustments;for non-subject sentences,the approaches such as translating Chinese active sentences into English passive sentences and adding subjects directly are adopted;for long sentences,the translator tries to achieve the natural and fluent treatment of the translated text by reorganizing and adjusting the sentence order.At the text level,for coherence of discourse,invisible subjects and conjunctions that do not exist in the original text should be added;for coherence of classical Chinese,the translator manages to achieve the semantic and stylistic equivalence by adopting methods such as liberal translation and literal translation.The major finding of the research in this thesis is that Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory significantly guides the Chinese classics translation.Through the combination with functional equivalence theory,the author of this report expects that the analysis of this theory and the selection of relevant translation strategies in this report can provide a reference for the translation practice of similar literary critical texts.