Abstract
Chinese family instructions serve as a crucial medium for understanding traditional Chinese culture and social structures. As a paradigmatic work of the Southern Song Dynasty, Yuan Shi Shi Fan holds significant value in the study of translation and the global dissemination of Chinese culture. This paper takes Patricia B. Ebrey’s English translation (1984) as its primary object of analysis and, drawing upon Newmark’s theory of communicative translation, examines how the translator negotiates between fidelity and readability across three dimensions: linguistic structure, cultural allusion, and rhetorical style. The study finds that Ebrey employs strategies such as sentence segmentation, logical explicitation, intratextual interpretation, supplementary annotation, and rhetorical reconstruction to enhance both the accessibility and the communicative effectiveness of the translation. At the same time, the prioritization of readability sometimes results in the flattening of nuanced cultural details, illustrating a key limitation of the communicative approach. The findings provide meaningful insights into the practice of translating Chinese classics and cultural texts more broadly, while also underscoring both the applicability and the limitations of communicative translation theory in cross-cultural interpretation.
References
Adil, M. (2020). Exploring the role of translation in communicative language teaching or the communicative approach. SAGE Open, 10(2).
Bol, P. (2001). This culture of ours: Intellectual transitions in T’ang and Sung China (N. Liu, Trans.). Jiangsu People’s Press.
Cao, S. (2011). Readings in original texts of Chinese culture. Beijing Normal University Press.
Ebrey, P. B. (1984). Family and property in Sung China: Yüan Ts’ai’s precepts for social life. Princeton University Press.
Gao, J., & Luo, L. (2024). Translation practice of science fiction from the perspective of communicative translation theory: A case study of Poems for the wild. English Square, (34), 7-11.
Guo, R. (2025). The impact of communicative translation on the English rendering of complex sentences in Jinkui Yaolüe. Overseas English, (10), 28-30.
Ji, Y. (2000). Annotated catalogue of the Si Ku Quan Shu. Hebei People’s Press.
Liu, H. (2022). Design of English translation system of Chinese medical terminology based on semantic neural network mining from the perspective of communicative translation theory. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Smart Systems and Inventive Technology (ICSSIT 2022) (pp. 1057-1060).
Lou, H. (2017). Collection of Chinese family instructions throughout the ages. Zhejiang Ancient Books Publishing House.
Newmark, P. (2001). A textbook of translation (Reprint edition). Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Qian, M. (2004). On the relationship between scholarship and aristocratic families in the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties. In Collected essays on the history of Chinese academic thought (Vol. 3). Anhui Education Press.
Tillman, H. C. (1986). [Review of the book Family and property in Sung China: Yüan Ts’ai’s precepts for social life, by P. B. Ebrey]. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 106(2), 403-404.
Wang, S. (2025). A study on prose translation from the perspective of communicative translation theory: Taking Xia Mianzun’s The Loneliness of Middle-Aged People as an example. New Legend, (19), 37-39.
Yang, T. (2024). Translator’s subjectivity from the perspective of communicative translation: A study of The Heavy Wings and Dream of the Red Chamber. Jingu Wenchuang, (48), 113-116.
Zhao, Y. (2023). A study on the family education thought in Yuan Shi Shi Fan [Master’s thesis, Henan University].
Zheng, W. (2018). Exploring Newmark’s communicative translation and text typology. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Social Science, Education and Humanities Research (SSEHR 2017) (Vol. 185, pp. 628-630).
Zhou, R. (2019). A review of the translation and research of Chinese family instructions in the English-speaking world. Journal of Yangtze Normal University, 35(2), 84-91, 127.