A Report On E-C Translation Of The Memorial Articles About Timothy Richard

This translation report is based on the Chinese translation practice of the memorial articles of the British missionary Timothy Richard.The source text consists of a number of memorial articles about Timothy published in various English newspapers in 1919,including the memorial words given by different reverends,obituaries and missionary monographs.They introduce Timothy’s life and his main experiences and achievements during his missionary work in China.Since the source text has the linguistic features of both documents and literary works,the main difficulty of the translation task lies in how to accurately reproduce the cultural information in the source text and ensure the concise sentence pattern and coherence of the translated text.Reiss’ s theory of text typology focuses on the achievement of text functions and divides text into informative text,expressive text,operative text and audio-medial text.The memorial articles of Timothy not only convey the information to the public but also pay attention to the communication with readers,hoping to inspire them to think and take corresponding actions,so it has both informative function and operative function.Therefore,based on Reiss’ s text type theory,this paper discusses how to reproduce the informative function and operative function in the translation of culture-loaded words,proper names and long sentences.At lexical level,domestication,back translation and free translation are adopted to ensure the accurate recurrence of the cultural information in the source text,and at the same time to attract the target readers;at syntactic level,three methods are used to ensure a smooth and natural translation,including division,a combination of literal translation and free translation and voice shifting;at textual level,the style of source text is reproduced by omission,repetition and annotation to ensure the realization of both informative and operative function.This translation report is divided into five chapters: Chapter 1 is the task description,including the background and the significance of the task;Chapter 2 introduces the process of the translation task,including preparation before translation,translation process and proofreading after translation;Chapter 3 elaborates the text type theory and its application in this study.Chapter 4 is the case study,in which the problems and the corresponding solutions in the translation practice are analyzed in three aspects,i.e.,the translation of words,sentences and discourse.The last chapter summarizes the gains and limitations of this translation practice.