A Practice Report On Substitutive Transformation In The Chinese Translation Of Jeep:The History Of America's Greatest Vehicle

In the modern world,the vehicle is increasingly becoming an indispensable tool for economic development and people's social life.The developing history of the vehicle brands,especially the world famous ones receive much concern.Due to the differences of regional culture and the complex statement,numerous professional terms in the works of automobile history,the difficulties emerge in reading the original automobile historical texts.Therefore,the translation of such kind of text has practical significance.Translation is not only an inter-lingual transformation,also an intercultural transformation.Due to the differences of cultural background and the way of thinking between China and West,Chinese and English are substantially different both in lexical semantic and syntactic structure.As a result,it is always considered difficult to realize the complete correspondence between the Chinese translation and English text in terms of words and expressions as well as syntactic structure.Hence substitution is necessary in the process of translation to make the translation accord with the expression habits of target language and to enhance the accuracy and readability of translation.Jeep: the History of America's Greatest Vehicle is a non-fiction historical book written by Patrick R.Foster,the notable American automotive writer and historian.This book,characterized by the rigorous language and exquisite style of writing,gives a vivid description of the birth background and developing history of Jeep,the famous automobile brand.The translation practice selects the introduction and the first two chapters of this book as the source text,with inter-lingual transformation theory as perspective,analyzes and summarizes the problems in the process of translation with the adoption of substitutive transformation strategies from the perspective of words and syntactic structure,in the hope that this report would provide experience and implications for such text translation.Aiming at the difficulties and problems,found in the translation,of lexical semantic asymmetry and syntactic structure differences,the practice report discusses the application of lexical and syntactic substitutive transformation.The lexical substitutive transformation takes the methods of substitution translation and explanation translation,and the syntactic substitutive transformation takes the methods of word order conversion,sentence type conversion and grammatical components conversion.The case analysis shows that the substitutive transformation has certain validity and practical value for the settlement of semantic asymmetry and syntactic differences,which might provide implications for the translation of this kind of texts.