关键词: 回译; 科幻小说; 《易经》; 小说翻译; 文学翻译

Abstract:

One of the difficulties in translating The Man in the High Castle is the back translation of quotations from The Book of Changes. On the one hand, these quotations guide the development of the plot in the novel; on the other hand, they feature oriental culture. Therefore, their translation is of vital importance to the translation of the novel as a whole. Back-translation is a special topic in translation studies, whose principles, methods and functions are different from those of general translation. It is generally held by many translation scholars that restoring the original content is the best way for back-translation. Based on the practice of the author of this paper, it is argued that the use of back-translation is determined by the type of the text to be translated, the target content to be back-translated and the target reader. In this paper, the back translation is classified into two types. One is the translation of special terms, and the other is the translation of horizontal lines and hexagrams. The analysis of the examples shows that the back-translation embedded in the translation of science fiction can be done by means of liberal translation and restoration plus footnotes. In this way, the translated text can be more coherent and readable than it is done otherwise.

Keywords: back-translation; science fiction; Book of Change; fiction translation; literature translation