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t necessarily highly educated, plain English strives to be concise and clear in form, from sentences to the wording (Li Changshuan, 2012: 60). Therefore, for the translation of four-character structures, translators should also strive to make the translation conform to the expression habits of concise English and avoid lengthy translations. When introducing a scenic spot, Chinese people tend to use parallel structures and gorgeous words to highlight feelings rather than facts, and four-character structures are often used. However, people in English-speaking countries tend to put priority on explaining the facts and the issues rather than focusing on the feelings, so they tend to use simple words to describe things directly. In the translator’s translation materials, there are many four-character structures that are concise but have a rich connotation and the translation of them should consider the feeling and habits of the target readers, that is, the foreign tourists. Correspondingly, omission and restructuring were mainly employed to translate four-character structures.

Conclusion

The material for this translation practice is selected from Xitang—A Vibrant Age-old Town, which covers various aspects of Xitang’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The translation task is challenging as the source text contains many unique expressions in Chinese that involve cultural connotations and historical allusions. In this report, four main difficulties were analyzed and corresponding strategies were discussed.

Firstly, the source text features many four-character structures, which carry rich historical and cultural connotations. For the four-character structures, the translator adopted omission to deal with the repetition of similar information. In addition, restructuring was employed to break down the four-character structure according to the logic of the original text when translating into English, in order to deliver a smooth and fluent translation.

Secondly, in terms of the translation of culture-loaded words, the translator first searched for information online to understand the cultural background behind the original text. For words that reflect Chinese and Western cultural gaps, the translator adopted the method of transliteration combined with annotation, which not only retains the Chinese characteristics but also explains the cultural connotation in the target language. For culture-loaded words without equivalent expressions in western cultures but can be described in English, liberal translation was employed to convey the cultural meaning behind the words to readers.

Thirdly, long and informative run-on sentences appear frequently in the original. Correspondingly, division was used to deal with long run-on sentences. The translator first analyzed the invisible logical relationships and content levels in the sentences, and then divided the sentences appropriately, so that the translation is easy to understand, clear in its hierarchy, and more in line with the English sentence structure. For the repetitive elements in the run-on sentences, the combination method was adopted to make the translation compact in sentence structure and concise in content.

reference(omitted)