A Report On The Chinese Translation Of Women Of The Pandemic:Stories From The Front Lines Of COVID-19(Introduction-chapter 2)

The material for this translation practice is excerpted from the Introduction,Chapter 1and Chapter 2 of Women of the Pandemic: Stories from the Front Lines of COVID-19,a book written by Canadian writer Lauren Mc Keon.With a total of about 15,000 English words,this part tells the stories of Canadian women on the front lines of COVID-19,including what they experienced,what they suffered from,as well as the important roles they played during the early days of the pandemic.Three major difficulties are found to be solved in the translation process.First,some words or phrases would be difficult to understand when being translated into Chinese literally word by word.Second,long English sentences are complex in structure,even contain two or more clauses.Third,the logical relationship,sentence pattern,mood and emotion in the source text differ from those in Chinese.In order to solve these problems,Skopos Theory is employed in this project to explore solutions: When translating words and phrases,the translation methods of “addition”,“subtraction” and “explanatory translation” are used to make the target text conform to Chinese expression habits and China’s national conditions.When translating long and complex English sentences,such translation methods as “division”,“combination” and “transference” are used to reorganize the sentence,thus to make the target text more coherent,meeting the reading habits of Chinese readers.Meanwhile,the translation strategies of “adding footnotes” “adding or changing conjunctions” and “sentence pattern and mood conversion” are adopted to make the target text easy to understand while keeping faithful to the source text,so as to achieve inter-textual coherence.This study finds that the Skopos Theory can play a very important role in guiding the translation of documentary literary works,and it can effectively solve many problems in the E-C translation of news-like informative texts,such as the target text is stiff,the sentence is too long to read,as well as the sentence pattern or mood is not faithful to the author’s original intention.Under the guidance of the Skopos Theory,the translator firstly determines the translation purpose,then explores translation methods that can help the Chinese readers understand and accept the target text,so as to make the target text smooth and readable and improve the translation quality.In this way,the translator hopes to provide some reference for the E-C translation of similar texts in the future.