A C-E Translation Report On The Great Physician To All:Wu Lien-Teh(Excerpt)

This report is conducted on the ground of the translation practice of the narrative nonfiction The Great Physician to All:Wu Lien-Teh written by Meng Jiucheng.This book presents the life story of the famous Chinese medical scientist Wu Lien-Teh,and the selected source text of this project is the ninth chapter of this book,which briefly introduces Wu’s whole life and his families and friends who exerted major influence on him.Semantic translation and communicative translation proposed by Peter Newmark is the primary strategy of this translation project.As narrative nonfiction is a special literary form that emphasizes both authenticity and literariness,which means it shows the characteristics of expressive text and informative text at the same time,semantic translation and communicative translation are both applicable in the translation of this text.This report analyzes the translation of the text based on four types of difficulties encountered during the translating process and discusses relevant solutions to these problems in the hope of providing some reference for the translation of narrative nonfiction in the future.Difficulties at the lexical level involve the translation of different types of culture-loaded expressions.Transli addition,paraphrase,and annotation are the most used methods in dealing with these expressions.Difficulties at the stylistic level include rhetorical and colloquial expressions.Literal translation,addition,and paraphrase are helpful methods in these cases.For the previous two kinds of difficulties,semantic translation is usually given priority and communicative translation is employed when literal translation is inapplicable,but for difficulties at the textual level,communicative translation plays a dominating role.Analysis at the textual level mainly focuses on cohesion and coherence,and the specific translation methods to achieve cohesion and coherence include addition,omission,explication,and restructuring clause order.Besides,the report discusses the translation of incorrect expressions in the source text,to which condition communicative translation is mostly applied,and the incorrect expressions should be corrected in the translation by annotation and addition.In general,the name of Wu Lien-Teh may be better known and the translation study of narrative nonfiction can be enriched through this project.