A Report On The Translation Of How To Be Good

This report is based on the translation of an excerpt from John Harris’ book How to be Good:The Possibility of Moral Enhancement.It is a scholarly monograph of bioethics,in which John Harris elaborates on his ideas towards "moral enhancement"with a large quantity of terms and long sentences,resulting in great difficulties in the understanding and translation of the source text.Additionally,English and Chinese have inherent differences in word usage and writing style.As such,the author of this report must maintain a balance between the source language and the target language,especially in order to satisfy the needs of the target readers.According to the language features and style of the source text,the author of this report selected Skopos theory as the theoretical basis in order to better analyze and summarize the reasons for adopting specific translation methods and strategies throughout the entire process.In Skopos theory,translation action should be aligned with the purpose of translation,with a focus on the Skopos rule,the coherence rule and the fidelity rule.This report found that,after an analysis of the practical application of the three rules at lexical,syntactic and textual levels,the three rules are an indivisible whole,which requires translators to prudently deal with the relation among the three.In other words,translators are supposed to give consideration to both the readability of the target language and the target text’s faithfulness to the source text,under the guidance of the purpose of translation practice.This report not only provides future scholars who devote themselves to the studies on the translation of works of bioethics with a reference,but also encourages domestic readers to reflect on moral problems so as to achieve the improvement of moral atmosphere.