Translating Chinese Texts of Intangible Cultural Heritage into English from the Perspective of an Integrated Strategy

Abstract

This paper centers around exploring translating Chinese introductory texts into English concerning the intangible cultural heritage of Guangdong Province and Hainan Province. Based on analyzing the textual features of the Chinese texts, the paper puts forward the principles of two types of closeness and five Cs in terms of translating the original text that serves the informative and vocative functions. Then in accordance with the two translation principles, an integrated strategy has developed on the basis of alienation, adaptation and compensation for contextual and cultural default so as to render the source texts into perfect English. Specifically, with the guidance of the principles and the integrated strategy, this research focuses on how to translate text titles, sentences with unique culture-specific items and short passages by employing such methods as transliteration, transliteration plus literal translation, transliteration plus annotation, addition or supplement, interpretation, intra-text annotation, condensation, and substitution, etc. The integrated application of the strategies and methods does work to retain the original culture in the translated text, and on the other, makes the translated versions content-centered, culture-oriented, concise, clear and coherent both in form and in meaning, thus achieving the goal that the translated text should be closer to the cultural characteristics of the source text and closer to the thinking mode of target readers. It is hoped that this exploration will make contributions to the translation research into the texts in relation to the intangible cultural heritage of China.