The E-C Translation Of Abraham Lincoln And William Cullen Bryant:Their Civil War(Excerpt Of Chapter Two And Chapter Three) And A Report On The Translation

The source text of this translation task is selected from the book Abraham Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant: Their Civil War.The translator chooses Chapter Two and Chapter Three as the translation task.Chapter Two describes how Abraham Lincoln defeated his political adversaries and eventually achieved the victory of the election for the president.Chapter Three mainly introduces the secession between the south and north of America after the election and how Lincoln formed the cabinet and battled with those separatists.The translation of these two chapters can help target readers further know about the cause of the American Civil War.The source text is a historical work,which belongs to informative texts,and it aims to transfer historical knowledge.To achieve the communicative purpose of the translation,the translator adopts Skopos theory to guide the translation task.Based on the Skopos rule,the translator should try to translate the cultural terms and political vocabulary precisely so that the target readers can obtain the right information through the target text.In the light of coherence rule,the translator adjusts the structure of composite sentences,the passive voice and the nominalization to make the translation text more acceptable for target readers.According to the fidelity rule,the translator ought to translate the historical contents in the source text with abundant background knowledge mastered to ensure the target text being loyal to the source text.With the guidance of the Skopos theory,the translator analyzes the translation difficulties from perspectives of lexical and syntactic level and attempts to probe into the translation strategies of historical texts so that some referential experience can be obtained.