A Report On The Translation Of Feminist Stylistics(Chapter 3-4)

As a translation report,this thesis chooses Feminist Stylistics(chapter three and chapter four),written by Sara Mills,a well-known British scholar,as the translation material and Peter Newmark’s translation theory as the theoretical basis to analyze the problems and feasible strategies that might be helpful in the translation of academic texts.Different from other kinds of discourse,academic texts contain the research achievements or comments made by scholars and researchers in particular fields to provide essential references for other researchers.Thus the content of academic texts must be conveyed accurately and completely in translation.Meanwhile,the readability of target language must be taken into consideration.Guided by the text types theory and two corresponding methods—semantic translation and communicative translation proposed by Peter Newmark,a well-known British translation theorist,this report attempts to examine the special features of academic texts and corresponding translation strategies at the levels of word,sentence and rhetorical devices,so as to provide some useful suggestions for the translation of academic texts.On the basis of language function,Newmark divides texts into three main types—informative text,expressive text and vocative text,and clearly proposes that communicative translation can be applied to both informative text and vocative text,while semantic translation is mostly used in expressive text.Although the informative function is the main function of the source text,the expressive function also exists in the text,so the translator should adopt communicative translation as the dominant method,and semantic translation as the subordinate one.Then the translator flexibly employs translation strategies like addition,conversion and division etc.to solve specific problems in the translation with the guidance of communicative and semantic translation methods so as to achieve the closest natural equivalence to source text and to improve the translation quality.The report is made up of five chapters.Chapter one is the description of the translation project.Chapter two is an introduction to the translation process,including pre-translation preparation,the problems and solutions in the translation and proofreading,etc.Chapter three briefly describes Peter Newmark’s translation theory and its application in the translation practice.Chapter four is a case study with specific translation methods used in the translation of word,sentence and rhetorical devices under the guidance of the semantic translation and communicative translation.Chapter five is a summary of the gains and limitations of the translation practice with a tentative discussion of some suggestions that might be helpful to other translators and future academic translation practice.