A Report On The E-C Translation Of Culture Counts:A Concise Introduction To Cultural Anthropology(Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Chesterman’s Translation Norm Theory

The author of this report chooses the first three chapters of Culture Counts: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology(Second Edition)as the translation task to discuss how Andrew Chesterman’s translation norm theory is applied to guide the translation practice.The source text is an academic work,written by two famous cultural anthropologists,Serena Nanda and Richard L.Warms.Classified as the informative text,the source text is characterized with penetrating theoretical elucidation and a detailed description of various cultural phenomena among different minorities throughout the world.Academic terms,culture-loaded words and complicated sentence structures add to the difficulty of providing a target text that meets target language readers’ expectation on the accuracy and professionality of the text genre,meanwhile achieving an ideal communicative effect.Examining translation in the context of cultural evolution,Chesterman’s translation norm theory focuses on norms,strategies and values in translation.Under the guidance of the theory of expectancy norms and professional norms,the translator illustrates how the problems involved in the translation process are solved with detailed case analysis,wherein syntactic strategies,semantic strategies,and pragmatic strategies are employed,together with specific translation techniques,such as transposition,unit shift,abstraction change,explicitness change,cultural filtering.The feasibility of Chesterman’s theory to the translation of academic texts is also illustrated.This report is expected to provide cases for other translators when dealing with similar subjects.