Translation Of The Implicit Information—A Report On The Translation Of The Colonial Period Of American History (An Excerpt)

This report is based on the author’s translation practice of Chapter 8 of Volume 2 of The Colonial Period of American History.The chapter focuses on Maryland’s political,economic,and religious complexities during its colonial period.Due to the cultural and linguistic differences between English and Chinese,the source text contains a great deal of implicit information for the target language readers.So successful transmission of the implicit information becomes the focus of the author’s exploration.The report focuses on the translation process guided by the Frame Theory and presents translation methods for sorts of implicit information through case analysis.Frame Theory claims that human perceptions and experiences of various things on a certain social basis are essential for acquiring linguistic meanings and the same or similar cognitive frame in the target language is necessary for faithful delivery of the source language.This report explores the translation of implicit information based on the target language readers’ cognition,trying to build in translation corresponding cognitive frames rather than just achieve linguistic equivalence.It is found in practice that for a similar frame with no identical components,the strategy of the replacement of frame components can be adopted,and suitable skills such as free translation,extension,conversion,and concretization can be employed;for a frame without counterpart in the target language,the strategy of frame transplantation can be used to make the unfamiliar frame visible and relevant skills as amplification and annotation can be applied.The author uses the Frame Theory to overcome the problem of target language readers’ inability to comprehend implicit information in the source text.And she expects to provide some references for both the translation of implicit information and the application of the Frame Theory in translation studies.