A Comparative Study of Strategies for Translating Military Terms in the Complete English Versions of San Guo Yan Yi

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.191217.238How to use a DOI?

Keywords

San Guo Yan Yi, military terms, translation strategies, comparative study

Abstract

San Guo Yan Yi is widely acknowledged as the first full-length romance novel of history that ever appeared in China and one of the “Four Great Chinese Classics”. It also has a lot of military terms which carry unique Chinese cultural connotations. However, deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture, those terms are likely to give rise to obstacles in translating, especially for translators whose cultural background differs greatly from what the novel is set. For this reason, this study attempts to compare strategies adopted to translate such military terms in the two complete English versions of San Guo Yan Yi. It is found that in translating the cultural elements of weapons, military attires, and military strategies, Brewitt-Taylor’s version tends to be more domesticated, explicit and liberal to make the translated text more natural for target readers to enhances the acceptability of the translated text among the ordinary, while Roberts’ version is more foreignized and faithful to make the translated text more informative for target readers, particularly scholarly ones to get a detailed picture of ancient Chinese culture, with the flavor and structure of the original text maintained to the largest extent.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mingzhi Ran
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/02/14
TI  - A Comparative Study of Strategies for Translating Military Terms in the Complete English Versions of San Guo Yan Yi
BT  - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 783
EP  - 786
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.191217.238
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.191217.238
ID  - Ran2020
ER  -