A Report On The Translation Of I Wear The Black Hat(Excerpt)

Since the reform and opening up, more and more Chinese ordinary people become interested in the foreign books. The foreign bestseller, involving all kinds of things, is the reflection of the contemporary hot issues and the window for us to know the foreign countries. Bestseller, with large sales, particularly attracts the attention of domestic publishers. However, the negative effects of the market economy pushes the publishers to pursue high speed of translating in order to dominate the market, and the cross-culture translation itself has big difficulty, which together leads to a mix of good and poor quality of the bestseller translation. At the present, there is no sufficient specific research about bestseller translation and more instructive discussions are urgently needed.This is a translation report. The original text is the preface, chapter one and chapter two of an American bestseller I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined). The whole report is divided into five parts:Part One is the introduction, including the general description of bestseller, the significance and motivation of the study, and the introduction to the task. Part Two is the background of the source text, including introduction to the author and the book, the main contents and language features. Part Three is about translation process, including the preparation of relevant materials, guiding theory and translation aids, details of translating and revising. The guiding theory used here is Translator’s Behavior. According to the property of the original text, the translator will pay more attention on the utility-attaining, being closer to the reader/society in the "Truth-seeking--Utility-attaining" Continuum Mode of Evaluation. Part four is about translation skills. The specific cases are analyzed, in which the translator’s behavior like thinking and choosing translation skills are described. Based on the "truth" as well as attaining the utility, the translator uses the combination of literal and liberal translation as well as some specific skills like addition of proper words, notation, and conversion of parts of speech and negation. Part five concludes with the lessons, enlightenment and problems and deficiencies to be solved in this translation project.