A Report On The Translation Of Linguistic Mitigation In English And Spanish(Chapters 1&2)

This is a report on the practice of English-Chinese translation of a social science text.The source material is excerpted from a pragmatic book Linguistic Mitigation in English and Spanish by Nydia Flores-Ferrán.Professor Flores-Ferrán has got deeply involved in the field of pragmatics and her writings are rich.The book Linguistic Mitigation in English and Spanish systematically studies the phenomenon of mitigation in English and Spanish,which is an important collation and supplement to the related research on mitigation.This report mainly addresses the typical problems encountered in the translation practice from lexical and syntactic levels,which can be summarized as: 1)the translation of synonym clusters,2)the translation of reporting verbs,3)the translation of compound sentences with demonstrative pronoun,4)the translation of logical implicity.Aiming at these problems in social science text,with Skopostheorie as the guiding theory,this report proposes a translation strategy: 1)taking the analysis of the translation purpose as the first step,2)combining the coherence rule and fidelity rule with various translation methods,3)adjusting the target text without changing the original meaning.Analyses show that the translation of social science texts can comply with Skopostheorie.Through this translation practice and the analyses of the problems,I have acquired a deeper understanding of social science text translation and further improved my translation ability.It is hoped that this report can provide some ideas and references for other translators in dealing with the translation of social science text.