Transformation Strategies Of Double-Dashes In English-Chinese Translation ——A Case Study Of The Myth Of The Nuclear Revolution:Power Politics In The Atomic Age

This translation report is written based on an excerpt from The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution:Power Politics in the Atomic Age.For its contents,this book focuses on the impact of nuclear weapons on international politics,taking the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War period as examples.It analyzes the puzzle of the nuclear age,namely,although the enormous destruction of nuclear weapons has deterred wars between the major powers,it did not alleviate the fierce international competition.From a linguistic perspective,the excerpt contains a large number of complex sentences,especially sentences with double-dashes,which is one of the most distinctive features.Since the application of double-dashes in Chinese and English is quite different,much attention should be paid to the punctuation meticulously in the translation.In this regard,this report,focusing on the change of punctuation,discusses the transformation strategies of double-dashes in English-Chinese translation from different logical semantic relations based on Halliday’s cohesion theory.Centered on the whole process of the practice,the former part of the report reviews the selection of the translation material and the translator’s translation practice,including certain difficulties and confusion during the process.For the latter part,this report,focusing on the analysis of sentences with double-dashes,firstly summarizes and discusses previous literature on logical semantic relations in cohesion theory,the function of punctuation in the text,cohesive and emotional functions of dashes,differences of dashes in English and Chinese,and translation skills of double-dashes that are summarized by former scholars.Combined with the literature review,specific case analysis has been made following seven logical semantic relations that are most frequently used in the source text,including addition,exposition,exemplification,clarification,temporal relations,causality and concession.Three major findings are summarized with the analysis of various transformation methods for different semantic relations.First,there are four main transformation strategies of double-dashes in English-Chinese translation,which are retaining double-dashes,replacing dashes with other punctuation,adding characters to substitute the dashes,and writing the parentheses between two dashes in bold fonts after deleting them.Second,double-dashes can be deleted in the Chinese text in most cases.Retaining or deleting them depends on the length of the parenthesis and the logical and emotional functions of the punctuation.Third,for different logical relations,strategies for transforming double-dashes can be similar.To be specific,deletion is preferable in most cases.In exposition,exemplification,clarification and temporal relations,parenthesis linked by the dashes can be put ahead after deleting the dashes if it just has a few words;In exemplification and causality,double-dashes can be changed into round brackets;As for the majority of the relations like addition,exposition,exemplification,clarification and concession,double-dashes can be transformed into commas to link the clauses.Particularly,if the part between the two dashes plays an emphasizing role in the sentence,its target version can be written in bold to highlight.Under the circumstance of present international situation,translating such texts may be conducive to the research on international politics and offer some knowledge on geopolitics from the nuclear perspective for further study.In addition,the distinctive linguistic features of the source text have also provided sufficient cases for analysis,which is conducive to translation studies,especially the transformation of punctuation.