A Translation Report Of Documentary Writing

The translation report is based on the selection of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy,written by Serhii Plokhy as the source text.And the translator chooses the preface and the chapter one as the text to be translated.This part tells the political and economic situation of the Soviet Union before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurs,and the writer goes deep into the historical causes and consequences of the disaster from a new perspective.In the translation process,the translator found several following lingual characteristics: the documentary writing is of journalistic nature and literariness,names of figures and places and events truly exist,and the context is of rigorous logic and involves many historical facts.Proper nouns of the political reform and the organizations,the short sentences that lacks of information and the long sentences of various information,the use of dashes,and the missing explanation to the important content.Therefore,the translator chose the Skopos theory as the guiding theory and discussed how to select appropriate translation methods to achieve the communicative purpose from the lexical level,the syntactic level,the punctuational level and the textual level.Combined with examples,the translator adopts the literal translation with annotation and translation upon citation with annotation,free translation,addition,division,reorganization,and annotation in order that the translation text is faithful to the source text and meanwhile,the communicative purpose of the translation text can be achieved.Skopos theory proposes requirements between the source text and the translation text and simultaneously provides more space for translator.Translator hopes to offer some experiences and lessons to those who translate the documentary writing under the guidance of Skopos theory through this translation report.