A Report Of The E-C Translation Of Translation,linguistics,Culture: A French-english Handbook(chapter Ⅵ)

In the process of globalization,translation activities become more and more frequent.Translation is not only a language transformation,but also a cross-cultural communication.Therefore,a good translator should not only have a good knowledge of the two languages,but also have a good understanding of the two cultures.Nigel?s book,Translation,Linguistics,Culture: A French-English Handbook discusses the relationship between linguistic knowledge and culture in translation.The book proposes that a good translator should understand the structures of the two languages as well as the two cultures.Knowing the linguistic knowledge can help translation.Although the book is aimed at students majoring in French-English translation,the translation strategies and methods introduced in the book are also of reference and guiding significance for English-Chinese translation.The author of this report employs the Relevance Theory as the guiding theory.Sperber D(1986)and Wilson D(1986)proposes that language communication is an ostensive-inferential process and translation is a cross-cultural communication.As the bridge of the source text and the target readers,the translator should understand the original meaning of the source text and convey the meaning to the target readers.However,considering the target readers? culture and reading habits,some adjustments must be made.Establishing the optimal relevance between the source text and the target readers is the most important principle in translation.Guided by the Relevance Theory,particularly its optimal relevance,this report finds that such translation methods as omission,amplification,rewriting,conversion and literal translation with annotation can help the source text more in line with the target Chinese expression habits.It also finds that other methods like plain literal translation do nothing but make the long and complicated sentences,slang and special terms lengthy and unintelligible.It is hoped that these findings as well as the experience gained in this translation practice will provide some references for the translation of similar source text in the future.