A Report On The Translation Of The Handbook For Faculty And Academic Administrators Of The University Of Pennsylvania(Excerpts)

This is a report based on the translation of the excerpts from The Handbook for Teachers and Academic Administrators of the University of Pennsylvania.The handbook mainly incorporates the organization,rules and regulations,faculty system,scientific research administration and admission criteria of the University of Pennsylvania respectively,adding up to around 160,000 words.Compelled by the limited space,only three parts are excerpted in the translation task:(1)Structure of the academic staff;(2)The tenure system at the University of Pennsylvania;(3)Terms and conditions of faculty appointments.The source text contains more than 20,000 words and is rendered into a total number of 27,000 Chinese characters.The handbook is categorized as an expository text,in which particular terminologies in the education domain are found here and there.Besides,on account of the discrepancies between English and Chinese,there are numbers of problems that emerged in the translation process.Fortunately,nine commonly-used translation skills summarized from some prevalent English-Chinese translation coursebooks are able to tackle most of the translation problems accordingly.The skills include amplification,omission,diction,conversion,division,shift of perspective,skills with passive voice sentences,skills with attributive clauses and skills with lengthy sentences respectively.In this report,forty-five examples are selected to expound how these problems from both the lexical level and the syntactical level were solved one by one with the help of the translation skills.Apart from the difficulties that can be worked out by most general translation skills,there are quite a few words,mostly nouns,in the source text that deserve to be pondered over carefully during translation.Consequently,it is found that the categorial recorrespondence approach developed out of the categorization theory in the cognitive linguistics is exactly an antidote to such problems.The categorization theory works in expounding the cognitive categories of mankind and is beneficial to comprehending the semantic meaning embedded in the language.As English and Chinese belong to two different language families,the linguistic re-categorization from all aspects is pervasively available in the transformation of one language to another.Such a recorrespondence approach is called Categorial Re-correspondence.With the knowledge of both the categorization theory and the categorial re-correspondence,three skills,namely full categorial re-correspondence,partial categorial re-correspondence and non-categorial re-correspondence,are developed accordingly to address the translation problems at the vertical axis from the lexical level.And it turns out that these skills are fairly effective in improving the accuracy of the target text.This report is composed of five chapters.The first chapter is a general description of the task,including a brief introduction to the translation project,the source text,the motivation of the task as well as the structure of the translation report.The second chapter covers the preparation prior to translation,such as the establishment of a glossary,the collection of parallel texts and the progress of the project.In Chapter Three,forty-five case analyses are illustrated respectively from the perspective of nine commonly-used translation skills.Chapter Four concentrates on categorial recorrespondence and utilizes three skills to elucidate the particular terms in the education domain.The last chapter is a summary of the achievements,the lessons learned from the task and the limitations related to translation.