A Report On The Translation Of TAMING DEMOCRACY "the People," The Founders, And The Troubled Ending Of The American Revolution (Experts)

This is a project report on the translation of TAMING DEMOCRACY "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution written by Terry Bouton, an associate professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which is published by Oxford University Press in 2007. Focusing on the revolutionary Pennsylvania, the author describes the hardship in Pennsylvania before American Revolution, the turnaround of the Revolutionary elite during the war and the sharp conflict between the farmers and government officials after war on the series of questions like land, tax, paper money, debt and so on, which reveals the democracy of America in the early days. The introduction, Chapter 1 and the first part of Chapter 2 were chosen to be translated, which describes the intention of the author, and the hardship the Pennsylvanians experienced before the; Revolution.As a historical book, the source text is different from other literary works. In addition to the historical facts, it also includes many historical materials. Some of these materials are poetry written by people in the history to express their emotions, which are of great literary significance, while others are just oral materials of ordinary folks, which are easy for people to understand. For this diversified source text, the translation of it is conducted under the guidance of the theory of "semantic translation" and "communicative translation" proposed by Peter Newmark. And some translation strategies are adopted during the translation practice, such as amplification, conversion and so on.Based on the description and analysis of this translation practice, the report comes to the following conclusions:1. Historical works cover lots of areas, such as economics, law and politics, translators should broaden the range of their knowledge. 2. Translators should analyze the long and complex sentences carefully, and then translate them appropriately according to the reading habit of Chinese readers.3. When there are words or sentences that are ambiguous, translators should look through lots of historical documents to make the translation more accurate.