A Translation Porject Report Of Protecting Our Cultural Capital-a Research Plan For The Heritage Sector

This is a report of translation project whose source text is a research plan of HumanScience Research Concil on the protection of African cultural heritage. It is a social-sciencetext that introduces the problems and solutions in the protection of cultural heritage in SouthAfrica. The plan is written in formal written language involving knowledge of various fields.There are large amounts of technical terms, abstract nouns, acronyms of institutions, legaldocuments and names of persons and places. Despite of those, it uses long and complexsentences, passive voice and non-finite verbs, bringing difficulties in translation because thedifferences between Chinese and English. Peter Newmark presents the text category theory,defining6types of texts based on their function and puts forward semantic translationstrategy and communicative translation strategy. According to his theory, different translationstrategies should be implied based on the type and function of the text. The source text of thisproject is a text of informative function which is proper for communicative translation.However it also involves speeches, legal documents that need semantic translation. Thetranslator therefore alternatively uses the two strategies so as to solve the problems includingtechnical terms, names of institutions, long and complex sentenses,etc.