Translation Strategies For Dashes In English-Chinese Translation

Making Numbers Count:The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers,written by Chip Heath and Karla Starr,aims to show the important role of number translation.The authors present a number of principles and techniques of number translation,which are further illustrated with vivid cases.The authors write in a colloquial way with flexible expression.When translating this book,the large number of dashes with various functions is a major feature of the original text and one of the difficulties in translation.Therefore,the translator decides to explore the translation strategies fro the dash structure in English and the principles of using those translation skills.Descriptive translation studies and case studies are adopted in this report.I analyse dashes in the original text from the perspective of semantic relations,combining the classification of semantic relations by Halliday and Huang Guowen to classify the 108 dashes appearing in the translation excerpt into Equation,Enumeration,Explanation,Extension and Enhancement.Four translation skills are adopted,including keeping the dash structure,substituting dashes with other punctuation,adding conjunctions and adjusting the sentence structure.The translator believes that the final translation choice should be made through a thorough analysis,weighing factors including the fluency of the text,the sentence structure,semantic relations,context and the reader’s reading experience.The dash structure should be retained when the Chinese dash has the same function and the sentence structure is simple.The dash structure should be deleted when the Chinese dash does not have the same function or when the sentence is too long or too complex.Conjuctions should be added when a semantic relationship is implied between the content linked before and after the dash.The sentence structure should be adjusted when the original dash structure connects too much content in the middle of the sentence.These are the four principles I summarized for using these skills.In this report,I selected 31 examples to illustrate them in detail,in the hope of providing some reference for related research in the future.