Professor Mei Deming Gave Lecture on Puzzles and Discovery in Translation Practice
2015-09-15
On May 15th afternoon, the 7th lecture on “Puzzles and Discovery in Translation Practice”of “Lecture Series Under Yuelu Mountain” was held in the Meeting Room 301 of the Second Office Building. Professor Mei Deming, a doctoral tutor in Shanghai International Studies University gave the lecture. Professor Bai Zhenxian, dean in School of Foreign Languages presided the lecture.
Professor Bai warmly welcomed Mei Deming and briefly introduced his academic achievements. Professor Mei humorously cited “Hunaneses are intiative” at the beginning, and analyzed puzzles in translation with vivid examples. He noted that the Chinese was an analytic language while English was both analytic and synthetic coupled with the Chinese richness in its gradual change from synthetic to analytic. Therefore, in the translation process may appear such problems, like to be standard or non-standard, to be implicit or explicit, to be clear or unclear, to be formally loose or spiritually collective.
Professor Mei explained what was the translation and how to translate from from Buddhist and Taoist perspective. With a large number of historical facts, translation of literary works he told us that to translate we needed to understand the philosophic theories whose realm determined the translation competence. Professor Mei reminded us to get out of the original, to understand the author’s thoughts, to adjust, not to treat translation problems with fixed eyes, to pay attention to some idiomatic usage, to forget the form but keep the spirit, through which we could finally feel the charm of understanding ancient philosophic ideas. And only in this way could we cross barriers of linguistic diversity, correctly interpret and inherit our civilization.
In the interaction, professor Mei answered questions from teachers and students in detail and professor Bai gave a short summary for this lecture which later ended in everybody's warm applause. (Chen Jianglu)
Editor in charge: Yang Jia
