On the Translational Poetics for Museum Commentary: A Case Study of the Archaeological Excavations at the Royal Cemetery of Haihunhou Kingdom in the Han Dynasty

Abstract

Andre Lefevere believes that translators must adapt to the requirements of the times in the translation, so the language of the translation is inevitably manipulated by the dominant poetics. As a branch of applied text translation, museum commentary should not only convey the information of the cultural relics, but also introduce and disseminate Chinese history and culture to foreign tourists, whose language requires accuracy and vitality. Therefore, the linguistic level of museum commentary translation is bound to be manipulated by translation poetics. In the light of Levefere’s poetics of translation, the paper attempts to analyze the translation of Haihunhou museum commentary from three linguistic levels and finds out that the translated version’s poetics have actually changed, including lexicon, syntax and rhetoric, to restore the characteristic language form of the original text. And it concludes domestication, literal translation and the translation methods frequently applied, with the desire for providing an innovative theoretical direction for the study of translation of museum commentary.