A Report On The E-C Translation Of How The Word Is Passed:A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America(Excerpts)

This translation report is based on the E-C translation of the chapter 2 and chapter3 of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by the American writer Clint Smith.The book displays the landscape of the black slave’s violent struggle to escape slavery through his visit at nine sites.The materials featuring literariness and truth contain abundant historical proper nouns,and complicated and fuzzy sentences in its description.With the assistance of thick translation strategy,this report analyzes the difficulties encountered in this translation.Case study in chapter four is the kernel of this report.The translator is mindful to organize and analyze the difficulties in three respects so as to explore the translation methods and skills of historical texts under the guidance of thick translation strategy.Considering the author’s intentions and readers’ need,the translator adopts footnotes,in-text annotations and illustrations toward important person names and place names,and names of historical events in the lexical level.Then in the syntactic respect,the translator employs techniques,including amplification and repetition to analyze the fuzzy sentences.In the aspect of textual level,translation of dialect is realized through minor sentences with appellations translated into the dialect of North of China.As for the translation of poems,symbols,metaphors and rhymes are maintained through carefully matching the similar expression and sounds in two languages,and this helps to achieve faithful and literary target text.Guided by thick translation strategy,the translator posits that proper annotations can make the translation more coherent but the author’s intentions and readers’ need should also be taken into consideration in avoidance of the misunderstandings.This report hopes to widen the scope of E-C translation on thick translation strategy,providing references to others that focus on historical literature translation as well.