A Report On E-C Translation Of The Land We Live In（Chapters 7-12）

The translation material is excerpted from Chapters 7 to 12 of The Land We Live In,a book written by Henry Mann,Published in 1896.The source text mainly talks about the history of the United States,which introduces education,war,puritans,religion,law,and school of the America.The original text contains many historical figures and facts,which are not only objective,realistic and concise,but also have a strong literary character.The translation practice combines the documentary and literary characteristics of documentary literature,reflecting the informational and expressive functions of the text.Peter Newmark’s theory of semantic translation and communicative translation is chosen as the guidance of this translation practice.Culture-loaded words,compound words,proper words,nominalized structures,long and difficult sentences have become the difficulties.Because of these languages difficulties,under the guidance of translation theory,the author needs to combine them with specific examples and adopted some translation techniques,such as omission,conversion,class shift,sentence division and combination,restructuring of a sentence,so that the target text can be semantically appropriate and communicatively acceptable by the target readers.Through this practice,the translator finds that the combination of Newmark’s communicative and semantic translation strategy could give good guidance on the documentary literature translation practice.But in some specific discourses,these strategies should be combined flexibly basing on the accurate analysis of the language function of the source text.Under the guidance of communicative translation theory,translation can be made closer to Chinese readers’ language habits by changing word categories,reconstructing sentence structures and adding and deleting words appropriately,thus the reading experience is optimized.