Translation Report Of ’That Is The Dad And This Is The Mum’: Parent-child Co-construction Of Heterosexual Identities In Conversations

This paper is the translation report of “‘That is the dad and this is the mum’:Parent-child co-construction of heterosexual identities in conversations”. The paper isa research which studies how the communications between the adults and childreninfluence the sexual identities of the children. For a long time, there have been fewstudies about sex and children. It is common knowledge that the younger children haveno sexual awareness. However, this paper put forward another idea, i.e. the sexualidentity is formed in the first few years of one’s life, and the language environment ofthe younger children has played a huge role in forming the sexual identity. While mostof the heterosexual adults have formed a “norm”(heteronormativity) without knowing,and they pass heteronormativity to children through generation to generation bylanguage they use unintentionally, which put other sexual identities remain invisible. Inthis case, study about the language and the children’s sexuality is crucial. So on onehand, translating of the paper can popularize scientific knowledge of the readers, and onthe other hand, the translating techniques of the translator can be strengthened and theexperiences of this translation can also be beneficial to other translators in similar texts.There are mainly two difficulties in translating this text, one is the new words, andthe other is the long sentences. For the former, the translator adopted techniques ofliteral translation and liberal translation, because many of the words are rare and can notfound in dictionaries. For the latter, the translator applied the method of addition,omission, adaptation and changing a long sentence into short ones, etc. The source textis an academic paper, so that the words and sentences are more rigid than normalarticles, which requires the translator to read more parallel texts and use google tocompare the translations.From above mentioned, to study the language development and their sexualidentity is of importance. This is a novel study which is rarely seen at home or abroad. So the translator find it useful to translate it into Chinese. The translation may bringlights to the study of language, of children’s language acquisition, of sexual identity andthe phenomenon of heteronormativity. Besides, the source text is a publish essay fromacademic journal "Gender and Language", which in a way ensures its quality andcredibility.