| The two essays for the English-Chinese translation project are:(a)"Improving the Response Rate to a Street Survey:an Evaluation of the ’But You Are Free to Accept or Refuse’ Technique";(b)"Cross-Cultural Investigation of Compliance without Pressure: The’You Are Free to...’Technique in France, Ivory Coast, Romania, Russia, and China". The first essay explores effectiveness of the BYAF technique in street surveys. According to the text, the BYAF technique is a compliance procedure in which the person surveyed tends to accept a request after being told that he or she is free to accept or refuse a request. The effect of the technique has been tested in many studies, but its effect in street surveys has not yet been explored. An experiment is thus conducted, and its results show that the technique helps to increase response rate in street surveys. The commitment theory is quoted to analyze the underlying process of the technique and explain how the technique boosts compliance rate. In the second essay, four experiments compare the effect of the BYAF technique in five countries--Ivory Coast, Russia, China, France and Romania. Ivory Coast, Russia and China belong to collectivist cultures, whereas France and Romania are classified as individualist cultures. It is found that the BYAF technique is more efficient in individualist cultures. This result is explicated theoretically with the commitment theory and the psychological reactance theory.Socially, the translated version produced in the project will inform Chinese readers of the BYAF technique and its usage. Therefore, they may take advantage of the technique in cross-cultural communication. Academically, the solutions to the problems found in this translation practice will benefit other translators. This report focuses on how to translate long sentences, which is the most outstanding problem in the translation and a difficult one for other translators. It is expected that this report will help them in their future translation practice.As a post-translation product, the report mainly discusses translating problems which include how to understand the literature review parts and technical terms, and how to translate long sentences and some words and phrases. In view of comprehension of literature review and technical terms, I have tried to consult related articles, dictionaries and encyclopedias. As for expression of some words and phrases, I have learned from parallel texts and used different strategies, like semantic extension, explication and adaption. But the most prominent problem is how to translate long sentences because of the generality of long sentences in the selected texts and difficulty in translating them.The report contains three parts. The first part introduces the project, including the source, content and characteristics of the selected materials, as well as significance of the project and the focus of the report. The second part defines long English sentences and explores two translation methods, namely following the original syntactic order and reinventing sentence structures. The first method is so called because the word order of the translated version is basically in line with that of the original text. It is to divide the original long sentence into sense groups which are then translated without major change in the syntactic order. Reinventing sentence structures is to partly or completely tear apart the original sentence, and then rearrange the parts so as to convey the meaning of the original. A lot of examples are provided to illustrate these two approaches. The third part summarizes the report. It is found that the method of following the original syntactic order is preferred when the English syntactic order does not conflict with that of Chinese; otherwise, the method of reinventing sentence structures is called for. Moreover, similarities between English and Chinese lay the foundation for translation, while differences between them shall also be taken into consideration in translation. |
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