A Report On The Translation Of Communicating Fashion:Clothing,Culture And Media(Preface,Chapters 1&2)

The book Communicating Fashion: Clothing,Culture and Media was chosen as the source text for this translation practice to explore the E-C translation of informative texts under the guidance of Reiss’ text typology.The book was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2021.The main content of this translation is the preface,Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of the book,which focus on the concepts related to fashion and communication,especially clothing communication.In general,the source text is plain in language,content-oriented and belongs to informative texts.The background knowledge of communication and fashion studies,as well as related psychology and sociology,involved in the source text presents the translator many difficulties during the translation process.At the lexical level,the book contains a large number of technical terms,as well as polysemous words and rhetoric devices including metaphor and metonymy.At the syntactic level,there are some long sentences modified by subordinate clauses and sentences with passive voice in the source text.The complexity of the grammatical structure poses a challenge for the translator in balancing the fidelity to the source text with the need to achieve a concise and fluent translation.And at the textual level,the source text uses reference and dashes to achieve the cohesion with flexible tense.According to Reiss’ text typology,the primary concern of informative texts is to transmit information,so the translation should adopt simple and clear expressions to represent the original content accurately and faithfully,conforming to linguistic preferences of the target readers.Under the theoretical guidance,the translator mainly adopts literal translation to translate terms,and chooses appropriate meanings for polysemous words and rhetorical devices according to contexts.At the same time,the methods of conversion,omission and addition are applied to transfer those long and complex sentences and sentences with passive voice.Then considering the differences between English and Chinese,the translator deals with dashes in a flexible way on the basis of their functions,and also applies explicitation on the cohesive devices and tense.In general,the translator adopts different translation strategies and methods to convey the information as precisely as possible to achieve the translation of informative texts.