Report On The Translation Of Mambo In Chinatown

The source text of this translation report is the first two chapters of a novel named Mambo in Chinatown, which is written by Jean Kwok, who is a New York Times bestselling author. The novel is about Charlie Wong’s transformation from a clumsy and humble dishwasher in NYC Chinatown to a confident and excellent professional ballroom dancer and dance instructor. The young Chinese-American woman strives to identify herself and acclimate to American culture while reconciling her family duties in Chinatown and her beloved ballroom dance.Cohesive devices, especially those at the grammatical level, are crucial to the construction of source text. However, due to the differences in factors such as languages, cultures, histories and patterns of cognition, different devices that weave words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs into a text are used by Chinese people and those from major English-speaking countries. To the translator, how to make the target text cohesive and coherent is the biggest problem. Therefore, drawing support from "Grammatical Cohesion"(Halliday & Hasan, 1976: 6), the report makes attempts to find out some effective translation techniques to deal with the problems, thus providing proper methods for the author’s future translation practices or the translation of similar texts.The report is composed of five parts: i.e., introduction, process description, theoretical basis, case analysis, and conclusion. The first chapter is an introduction to Mambo in Chinatown, and its author Jean Kwok. Chapter Two is a description of the process of translation. It presents how the translator prepared, practiced and improved the translation. And then cohesion and coherence as well as their relations are discussed in Chapter Three. In Chapter Four, the reporter makes an effort to analyze the translation of four grammatical cohesive devices from English into Chinese. In this part, all the examples are cited according to reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Chapter Five is the conclusion of translation techniques used in the E-C translation, and points out the limitation of the translation and the report.