A Report On The Translation Of The Oxford Handbook Of Oral History(chapters 13-14)

This is a translation report on The Oxford Handbook of Oral History which is written by Donald A. Ritchie and published by Oxford University. Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 are rendered into Chinese, based on which the relevant analyses are given.The Oxford Handbook of Oral History tells about the theories and methodologies of western oral history. It presents 33 chapters, which is divided into six parts according to major topics. Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 belong to the third part which is named as “theory and interpretation”. The selected text is about the research theory and methods, and has the characteristics of academic and readable. Furthermore, the original has a lot of specific words, the long and complicated sentences and unclear contextual logic. All these bring the very great difficulty to translation.The report is based on the “functional equivalence”proposed by Eugene A Nida. According to the characteristics of the original text, as well as the differences between “hypotaxis” and “parataxis” in English and Chinese, the author mainly adopts “domestication” strategy in translation. In the specific translation process, the author uses various translation methods, such as division translation, literal translation and free translation; amplification and annotation, conversion of parts of speech and so on. Furthermore,the author uses flexible ways of equivalence in grammar, semantics, words and style on different levels, and also changes the form of the original but retains the original content if necessary, trying to use the most natural language to express the original information.The Oxford Handbook of Oral History is recommended as classic books in the world of oral history. Its translation and introduction have certain representativeness and reference value for the study of oral history.