A Report On The Translation Of The Chinese In Britain 1800-Present:Economy, Transnationalism, Identity(Excerpts)

The translation material, The Chinese in Britain 1800-present: Economy,Transnationalism, Identity, was written by the British historian Gregor Benton and the Malaysian political economist Edmund Terence Gomez. It sets out the history of the Chinese in Britain, from the angle of changes in their economic and social standing,covering such topics as migration, association, transnationalism and identity.This translation report consists of five chapters. Chapter one begins with a detailed description of the translation tasks. Chapter two introduces the whole translation process. The third chapter elaborates on the framework of the relevance theory, including some of its main notions and key tenets. The fourth chapter presents a case analysis, in which I demonstrate the problems and difficulties occurring in translation from three linguistic dimensions—semantic, syntactic and pragmatic—and try to account for them with the core notion of “interpretive use”. The conclusion part summarizes the translation techniques and experience.According to relevance theory of translation put forward by Gutt, translation is regarded as a kind of interpretive use. That is to say, a translaton would be a receptor language text that interpretively resembles the original. Interpretive resemblance is a matter of degree. The more explicatures and implicatures shared, the closer the interpretive resemblance between two utterances. Direct translation and indirect translation are regarded as instances of interpretive use. In direct translation, a source language text interpretively resembles the original completely in the context envisaged for the original. During indirect translation, the translator presents his translation on the presumption that its interpretation adequately resembles the original in respects relevant to the target audience. Therefore, a translator would adopt different strategies to try to recreate the cognitive effects intended by the original communicator with the lowest possible processing effort on the part of the TT receptor.