A Report On Translating Creative Resources For The Early Childhood Classroom

Co-authored by two famous early education expert, Judy Herr and Yvonne Libby Larson Creative Resources for the Early Childhood Classroom is a textbook for early children. The book has designed various unique and innovative games and activities which allow children acquire knowledge in different fields and improve their competence while having fun. The games and activities are based on daily life, and easy to conduct. In addition, the language of the book is easy to understand and the description in it is vivid and interesting, which makes the book very popular. It wins many readers'hearts. In April 2014, through recommendation of my supervisor and classmates, the author got the opportunity to join in the project of translating the book. The part of the author's task was theme 46-50, about 22000 words. On basis of this translation practice, the author writes this translation report.This report firstly points out the motivation of the author to write this paper, and analyzes its significance. Meanwhile, the author introduces reader's response theory and explains the reason why the theory has been applied in translating the book. Then, the author describes the whole process of the translation practice in detail which consists of four parts, the background, the client request, the text analysis and the translating process of it. Next, the writer analyzes and summarizes the features of the target readers of the source text, with limited background information for western culture and foreign objects and with an interest-oriented study mode, and then in the light of the features, proposes three translation requirements of the translation practice:instructive, easy to understand and interesting for early children. Finally, the writer summarizes all the experiences and lessons she has obtained in the practice, points out the difficulties and problems during her translation and proposes specific translation strategies under the guidance of the reader's response theory.Since modern times, many translators and translation theorists have realized the importance of the target readers in translation, however, the practice and theory study on the translation of early children textbooks has not gotten adequate attention to target readers which leads to quite a lot problems, such as ignoring cultural differences and reading habitual disparity of target readers and being indifferent to readers'feelings. The author considers only when the receptors'response is taken as an important criterion for measuring the quality of a translation of textbooks and the functional meaning and cultural connotation being seriously explored, can the functions of the translation of the textbooks be actually achieved. The main purpose of the author to apply reader's response theory is to find out specific translation strategies for early childhood textbooks which can obtain a translation both faithful to the source text and satisfactory for the target readers.