A Report On The Translation Of The Excerpt From Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents

With the further deepening of the reform and opening-up,China needs to establish closer contact with the world.Therefore,understanding the state of other countries is significant for China’s development.In May 2020,George Floyd,a black American,died from force of execution by a white police officer,and triggered demonstrations and riots throughout the US and in many other countries.Under such a background,the author pays attention to the racial issue of the US,and selects Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents as the materials to carry out this translation practice program.As a social science book,Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents with the characteristics such as large quantities of information,a lot of proper nouns and complex sentence patterns was written by Isabel Wilkerson,an American writer,who pointed out the nature of American racism was the caste through a series of cases and argument.The key and difficult points in this translation practice are to make up for cultural differences,correctly transfer information and reduce the reading barriers of readers to the largest extent.Peter Newmark’s communicative translation theory centers on readers and stresses the accurate transfer of information instead of preservation of text form,which is suitable for the translation of texts of social science.Therefore,guided by the communicative translation theory,this translation practice report discusses approaches of translation from three aspects,words,sentences and discourse.In terms of words,proper nouns are translated by adding annotation and free translation,and four-character Chinese words are used to improve the readability of translation.For sentences,the approaches of passive voice conversion,long sentence segmentation and word order adjustment are used to avoid translationese as far as possible;As for discourse,the concretization of referential pronouns and adding of logical connectives are applied to make the text more coherent.Through using these translation methods,it is aimed to correctly transfer text information and provide readers with better reading experience.