Chinese-English Translation Strategies of Statuary Descriptions from the Perspective of Image-Text Relations

Drawing on a statuary description and its English translation at a scenic spot in a national key tourist city in China, this paper investigates translation strategies of multisemiotic texts, integrating Reiss' and Snell-Hornby's text typology as its theoretical basis, Martinec & Salway's image-text relation network and Smith & Klein-Braley's advertising translation strategies. It is found that apart from the usual linguistic and cultural translation errors, multisemiotic English translations often contain text-specific translation errors due to translator's failure to discover the image-text relations and adopt the corresponding translation strategy. An unequal status of image-text relation usually necessitates translation and it is necessary to add lexical and reference adhesive devices to the translation to enhance the image-text relation.