A Translation Report On Dr. Martin Luther’s House-postil (Excerpted)

The source text of this translation report comes from two sermons of Dr. Martin Luther’s House-postil:The Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter and The Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Easter. This translation report aims to record the process of the translation, study the problems emerged in the process and find out the solutions. What is worth mentioning is that I also summarize some general rules of translating the sermon which could inspire me in my future work. The topic of this translation report is of great avail:firstly, Dr. Martin Luther was an extremely important person in the history of Christianity, and the translation of Dr. Martin Luther’s works can enhance Chinese Christians’and scholars’understanding of him and Christianity; secondly, since the sermon is a very special text and few translators and scholars have translated and studied it, this report can provide reference to the future work.Chapter one and chapter two record the complete translation process:the background of the task, the requirements of the commissioner, the analysis of the source text, the translation plan, the information collection, the selection of translation strategy, the actual translation, and the proofreading. The focus of the two chapters is the lexical and syntactic features of the source text and the selection of translation strategy. Large numbers of Christian terms, some old and literary English words, nominal structures, and double synonyms are four lexical features of the source text. As for the syntactical features, there are many long and complex sentences, inverted sentences and passive voice sentences; besides, the sentences in the source text are also vocative and broken. Before the actual translation, Katharina Reiss’theory of texttypen and textsorten is applied to the analysis of the text of the sermon; after taking the texttypen of the source text, the target reader, and the requirements of the commissioner into consideration, I choose "a balance between the foreignizing translation and the domesticating translation" as the translation strategy.Chapter three is the core of the whole report-case study. This chapter can be divided into four parts:the translation in the lexical level, the translation of long and complex sentences, the translation of sentences with special structures and the cohesion and coherence in the translation. Christian terms, Christian allusions, the emotional coloring of words and the Christian language are studied in part one. Eugene Nida’s theory of kernels is adopted to guide the translation of long and complex sentences in part two. Part three is about the translation of inverted sentences, double synonyms, and nominal structures. In part four, cohesion and coherence in the translation are discussed.Chapter four is the conclusion of the translation report including the gains and the enlightenment from the translation. Thanks to the translation, I summarize three general rules of translating the sermon:the emotional coloring of the source text should never be ignored; social conventionality should be a guiding principle; and the target readers which are unfamiliar with’Christianity should mainly be taken into consideration. What’s more, I enrich my knowledge on Christianity, improve my translation abilities, and find some connections between theory and practice. To be a research-typed translator, to continue to improve my English and Chinese abilities, and to improve the abilities of finding an expert in a specific discipline and searching information are my three directions in the future work.