Abstract:

World Cultural Heritage is the material carrier of local knowledge. As an outstanding representative of the Ming and Qing Imperial Tombs, the Eastern Qing Tombs embodies a highly contextualized local knowledge system covering mausoleum institutions, feng shui (geomantic) theory, architectural craftsmanship, and ritual order. Taking Transknowletology as its theoretical framework, this paper examines the globalization pathway of local knowledge in English translations of tour commentaries for the Eastern Qing Tombs. It finds that the translation faces three core challenges: knowledge compression, knowledge explicitation, and knowledge transformation. These three correspond intrinsically to Transknowletology’s core principles of truth, goodness, and beauty: knowledge compression mainly meets the requirement of goodness (knowledge accessibility); knowledge explicitation realizes the integration of truth (knowledge fidelity) and goodness; knowledge transformation demands a dynamic balance across all three principles. Through strategies including phonetic-semantic translation, contextual supplementation and analogical interpretation, translators achieve systematic reconstruction of source local knowledge in the target language. On this basis, the paper proposes the concept of “knowledge adaptability” and a three-dimensional evaluation framework. This framework provides a theoretical tool for assessing cultural heritage translation effectiveness, enriches the practical connotation of Transknowletology, and offers a theoretical reference for paradigm building in cultural heritage international communication research.

Key words: Transknowletology, World Cultural Heritage, Eastern Qing Tombs, Local Knowledge, Knowledge Reconstruction, Knowledge Adaptability