Translation Strategies Of Dashes In English-Chinese Translation

This report carries out a case study of the translation of Beijing from Below:Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center by British anthropologist Harriet Evans.The translator selected two chapters with a total of about 30,000 words which contains 53 sentences with dashes.She mainly analyzes the functions of dashes in the English source text and discusses strategies for translating dashes serving different functions.Inspired by Halliday’s cohesion theory,the translator sorts the functions of dashes in her practice material into three main groups:explanation,exemplification and addition.She puts forward three methods,namely,retainment,deletion and conversion.It is found that when dashes serve to explain,they can be reserved in most cases.Concerning exemplification,deletion,conversion to other punctuation marks(commas or a colon)and conversion to the conjunction“比如”(such as)are three main methods.With regard to addition,translators can omit dashes and integrate relevant information,or place the new information in brackets as a supplement without interrupting the narration.When dashes in the target language share similar cohesive functions with those in the target text,translators can choose to reserve dashes in their target text;when reserving dashes will disrupt the cohesion of the translation,cause confusion or even misunderstandings among readers,translators should deal with them in a flexible way.Since fewer dashes are used in Chinese,it is better to reduce their number in English-Chinese translation.However,if using a number of dashes is a special feature of the author or this kind of text,translators should try to retain the writing style of the original text.This report is aimed to work out some strategies for translating English dashes into Chinese in such texts characterized by dashes as oral history.