A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of The Academic Text-Theories Of Culture (Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation Theory

With the increase of exchanges between regions and the deepening of globalization,the frequent exchanges between cultures inevitably bring about cultural conflicts.In order to help deepen people’s understanding of different cultures and avoid the problems that may be caused by cultural factors,the author translated chapters 7 and 8 of the academic work--Theories of Culture.The selected chapters touch upon some culture-related phenomena and the common cultural mechanisms behind them.The text selected for this translation report is an academic text with the following three typical features:(1)it contains a large number of technical terms and proper names;(2)there are many long and difficult sentences;(3)the passive voice is used extensively.The above three features are also the major problems that the translator needs to solve in the translation process.This report is an application of communicative translation theory into the English-Chinese translation of academic texts.The theory of communicative translation aims to accurately convey the information contained in the original text to the target reader,which requires translators to take accuracy and naturalness as the principles in the translation process.Guided by the principle of accuracy,the author solves the difficulties with regard to technical terms by consulting terminology databases and parallel texts together with employing the method of literal translation;as for the translation of proper names in the text,the approaches of using established translations,literal translation,transliteration are taken;in addition,the author corrects the wrong information contained in the original text caused by oversight or misprint.Under the guidance of the natural principle,the translator adopts the methods of adjusting the sentence order,linear translation and division to resolve the problems encountered in terms of long and complex sentences in the text;besides,in translating the passive voice,the strategy of converting the passive voice into the active voice is mainly adopted with retaining the passive voice as a supplement.From this meaningful experience,the author has gained a lot.Firstly,adequate pre-translation preparations are indispensable for ensuring the quality of the translation.Secondly,translation theory helps to solve the difficulties encountered in translation.Thirdly,as a translator,one should be meticulous when doing translation.