A Report On E-C Translation Of A Modern Slavery (Excerpts)

The source text,excerpted from A Modern Slavery,a compilation of letters initially published in 1906 by Henry Woodd Nevinson,records his visit to the Portuguese West Africa(currently Angola)during 1904 and 1905,when Nevinson made a secret investigation to local slave trade and slave system as a war correspondent.A Modern Slavery consists of 11 chapters,two of which labeled The Worst Part of the Slave Route and Savages and Missions are selected as the source text of this translation task.On the basis of the source text,Adaptation Theory,put forward by Jef Verchueren,is selected as the guidance of this translation task.In the process of translating,the difficulties and problems are mainly solved under the guidance of adaptation to language-external factors and language-internal factors of the source text and/or the target text.In this report,the language-external factors refer to communicative contextual correlates of adaptability,including the mental world,social world and physical world,while the language-internal factors refer to structural objects of adaptability,including but not limited to lexical meaning,sentence and clauses,as well as discourse(supra-sentential units),which are further detailed in Chapter Three of this report with some cases analysis.After cases analysis,conclusion may be drawn that the translator must consider the temporal,spatial,cultural,cognitive and emotional elements of the source text and/or the target text based on deep understanding of the source text in order to better convey its communicative purpose.To realize this goal,free translation,split,restructuring,and conversion of speech acts and punctuation may be adopted to some extent in the process of generating linguistic structure and reproducing semantic meaning in the target text.