A Report On The Translation Of Timed Readings Plus In Social Studies (Book9)

Timed Reading Plus in Social Studies, categorized as encyclopedia and designedin a timed reading form, mainly intended for an introduction of encyclopedicknowledge of popular science and classics of western culture to high school studentreaders, is a complete set of reading series which incorporates reading, leisure andlearning into a whole, whose copyright was officially imported by Jilin ForeignLanguage Education Publishing House, and is going to be published with a newlygiven title McGraw-Hill English-Chinese Bilingual Reading Library. The translationreport is based on the translation practice, the task of translating Book9in SocialStudies---one copy of the reading series.The translation work was tackled first on the basis of a thorough analysis of thetextual nature of the original text in regards to the peculiar cognitive competence ofhigh school student readers and in strict accordance with the client’s demands; thenliteral and liberal translation approaches as well as domestication and foreignizationare adopted, more frequently the combination of the two, in order to ensure theversion’s faithfulness, its smoothness as well as its amusing effect.At the beginning, an outline of the translation task and a description of itscompletion process are given in the report. After that, the case-study method wasadopted to analyze the translation techniques applied in this practice, and meanwhilesome difficult points---long sentence and passive voiced sentence translation, as wellas certain solutions are presented. Through a contrastive analysis of differenttranslation techniques adopted in the translation, one’s understanding of thedifferences between English and Chinese is further sharpened. However, it is notuncommon phenomenon that beginners may often find themselves entangled withsuch embarrassment of mistakes in translation practice, that is, the source text is oftenconverted into target text either by randomly omitting the messages andoversimplifying the expression, or by adding unnecessary words and distorting the tone or the purpose of the author, both of which lead to improper translation. So howto make the translated version free from the constraint of the source text in form, andin the meantime, keep it closest to the original in both content and style with a view togaining perfect translation effect by “coming in and out of” English and Chinesenaturally on the basis of the real understanding of the source text is the primaryproblem to be solved in this translation practice. Finally, a summary is made as towhat translators should do to be fastidious in wording at syntactical level in doingtranslation, and to reconstruct a translated version at discourse level, with the inherentlogic of the source text discourse as the analytical basis and in full accordance withthe coherence demand of the target text.Through this translation practice, the very thing that I might have perceived is:Language competence is the core in translation competence training; without a soundgrounding in language competence, the study of all translation theories or techniquesis simply like building a castle in the air. Therefore, in MTI translation teaching,teachers ought to focus on training students in their bilingual skills, especially in theirbasic skills of Chinese language.