A Translation Report On Strapped Into An American Dream(Excerpts)

With the development of tourism all over the world, travelling has grown up to be a more and more important way for people to broaden their horizon and relax their mind in recent years. The author chooses an excerpt from a travelogue Strapped into an American Dream as the translation material. The book is written by a famous American travel journalist Glenn Maynard. With his own unique experiences the writer introduces the beautiful scenery and human landscape in each state, which are beneficial to people to fully understand the United States from ecology, culture, history, landscape and so on. And the original material belongs to the tourism text, it is an inter-lingual, inter-social, intercultural and inter-psychological communicative activity, due to its own particularity and the differences between the English and Chinese, it is rather difficult for the translator to make a satisfactory translation.This translation practice selects the first five chapters and the travel notes in May 1992 as a translation project. The first five chapters are a brief introduction to the author’s inner activities for making a choice: whether to give up his work to pursue dreams or give up his dream to keep his work, as well as some necessary preparation before leaving. The author’s courage and determination to pursue his dream is also an enlightenment to those people who want to chase their dreams, but ultimately fails to take steps: to live in the present moment, do what you want to do. The second part is the author’s travel diary in first month, in May, the author’s first destination is Rhode Island and West Virginia, then visiting the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Quebec etc. The author introduces the landscape, the local customs, the culture and people’s life style in different places of America, which gives a wealth of material for readers to understand the social life of United States.The translation report first presents the background, purpose, significance and the process of the subject. Then the author discusses the key points and difficult points the author has experienced in the translation process. At last, the author analyzes and summarizes the basic or typical cases encountered in translation, combined with the difficult points discussed the translation strategies of tourism translation. The author explores tourism translation methods and techniques in three aspects: language style, adjustment of sentence structure, methods of adding and omitting. At the end of the translation report, the author summarizes the discoveries and enlightenments, limitations and deficiencies through this translation practice, expecting to provide a reference for future translators who may deal with the similar material.