An English-Chinese Translation Practice Report On Understanding Global Slavery:A Reader(Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Communicative Translation Theory

This practice report is based on the translation of the first chapter of Understanding Global Slavery:A Reader written by Kevin Bales under the guidance of the communicative translation theory(CTT).Kevin hopes that this book can be used as a textbook.As Newmark clarifies the textbooks are informative,the main function is to convey messages and the original author’s views.Newmark believes CTT can be applied to the translation of informative texts.As communicative translation is intended to achieve a certain effect on the target readers’ minds and difficulties and ambiguity should be avoided as much as possible,the translator can make certain adjustments to the content,form and syntactic structure of the source text to provide authentic,fluent and easy-to-understand target text to the readers.The words in the source text are formal and concise,and the logic is rigorous and clear,which not only requires high accuracy in the conveyance of messages in the target text and retains the original language style but also brings difficulties at three levels to the translator.At the lexical level,some terms in the original text are unfamiliar to the target language readers.Therefore,the translator makes annotations for explanation.In order to enhance the readability and communicative effect of the target text,the translator employs the techniques of conversion and semantic extension to translate those words difficult for the readers to understand.At the syntactic level,the difficulties lie in the translation of complex sentences and the passives.In communicative translation,the translator has the right to optimize the logic and change the syntactic structures in the source text.Therefore,the translator applies techniques of restructuring,negation and voice conversion in those sentences to remove the reading barriers of the target text readers.At the discoursal level,in order to enhance the coherence and readability of the target text and improve the communicative value,the translator chooses the techniques of explication of word meaning and addition of connectives to make the messages in the source text explicit and logical.