A Report On My Translation Of Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction(Introduction And Chapter1)

This is a report of translation practice. The author chose the first two chapters ofLincoln: A Very Short Introduction by Allen C. Guelzo, an American historian, as thetext to work on. In the translation process, the “communicative translation” and thetext typology put forward by Peter Newmark served as my guiding theory with anemphasis on target-text readers and information transfer effect. As the source text isinformative in nature, the communicative translation approach was adopted.The report introduces, in the first place, the background information of theoriginal text, the characteristic and publication of the “VSI” series, explains the goalsand significance of the translation task, and spells out the text typology and languagestyle of the original text. And then, the report also describes the efforts made by theauthor during the translation process. The focus of the report is the case study whoseanalytical theory is the communicative translation approach with specific examples ofwords and sentences. Three methods for word translation and for sentence translationare discussed respectively: in terms of word translation, changes in the word category,word-adding and word-cutting, and specification of word meanings; in terms ofsentence translaiton sequential order, reversed order and split order, and the structuresof long difficult sentences are reorganized so as to achieve natural and idiomaticexpression in the target language. Finally, the author’s reflection on the aforementioneddifficult language points concludes that communicative translation method isappropriately adopted for the translation of historical texts which deliver informationin most cases.