Quoting-reporting in English translations
Linguistic Explorations in Translation Studies - Analyses of English Translations of Ancient Chinese Poems and Lyrics - Guowen Huang
Guowen Huang [+ ]
City University of Macau
HUANG Guowen is Chair Professor of the Changjiang Programme selected by the Ministry of Education of P.R. China. He has been a professor of Functional Linguistics since 1996 at Sun Yat-sen University, P.R. China. He is now at City University of Macau. He was educated in Britain and received two PhD degrees from two British universities (1992: Applied Linguistics, Edinburgh; 1996, Functional Linguistics, Cardiff). He was a Fulbright Scholar in 2004-2005 at Stanford University. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal Foreign Languages in China (bimonthly) published by the Higher Education Press, China. He is also co-editor of the journal of Functional Linguistics (Springer) and co-editor of Journal of World Languages (Routledge). He publishes extensively both in China and abroad and serves/served as an editorial/advisory committee member for several journals, including Linguistics and the Human Sciences (Equinox), Language Sciences (Elsevier), Journal of Applied Linguistics (Equinox), and Social Semiotics (Carfax). He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Monograph Series Discussions in Functional Approaches to Language (Equinox). His research interests include Systemic Functional Linguistics, Ecolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies.
Description
In Chapter 11, we investigate the issue of quoting-reporting in English translations of Tang poems. We first briefly review the theoretical concept of quoting-reporting and differentiate quoting, reporting, direct speech, and indirect speech. Then we analyze the instances of quoting-reporting in some English translations of Tang poems. Finally, we discuss the problems we find in the analysis. Based on our comparison, we suggest that when translating quoting-reporting elements in Tang poems, translators should first take “formal equivalence” into consideration and meanwhile try to avoid using direct speech.