Dashes In E-C Translation

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,written by David Graeber and David Wengrow,has been selected as the source text for the translation.The book consists of twelve chapters,focusing on the history of human political organization.The authors present a novel viewpoint on the emergence and evolution of social organization,which is crucial for understanding the diversity of early cultures and the development of political organization.Two chapters from this book,are excerpted as the source text for the translation practice.On the basis of the translation practice,this report focuses on dashes in English-Chinese translation.A dash serves a crucial function in the discourse as one of the most widely used punctuation marks in English and Chinese.Although there seem to be some similarities between the functions of dashes in English and Chinese,some differences can also be found.In the ST there are a great number of sentences with dashes.The translation of dashes is thus critical.Under the guidance of Hacker’s classification of the functions of English dashes and Guo and Ding’s exposition of the functions of Chinese dashes,this report summarizes six methods of handling dashes – punctuation substitution,amplification,embedding,splitting-off,reverse-order translation and cutting,after comparing the functions of Chinese dashes and English dashes.This report is divided into five chapters.The significance of this report is introduced in the first chapter,along with a quick overview of the translated material.Chapter two describes the translation process,which is composed of the preliminary preparation,the problems overcome in the process of translation and proofreading of the first draft.Chapter three focuses on the contrast between the functions of English and Chinese dashes.Chapter four expounds the strategies,with the help of several samples,to deal with the dashes in the ST.Chapter five summarizes the findings and limitations in the translation practice process.