A Report On The Translation Of Inside Of A Dog (Chapter X)

This thesis is an English-Chinese translation practice report.The source text is Inside of A Dog written by Alexandra Horowitz,a PhD in cognitive science.The translation part is Chapter Ten which focuses on the study of dog.The chapter depicts dog's observation on human beings from a variety of aspects,such as man's mood,man's eye contact and man's body languages,all of which would probably arise a dog's response.This chapter also describes dog's cognitive abilities and draws a picture of what it might be like a dog.The text belongs to natural science category and its language is of moderate difficulty.It is an informative text and its target readers are dog lovers in English-speaking countries.During the process of the translating practice,the translator always keeps in mind that the language should be simple and precise and tries best to convey exactly the original meaning of the source text.There are some difficulties in translating.First,some biologic words are used in the source text which are not easy to understand for readers who know little about biology.Also,personification is applied to describe animals.It is hard to translate these rhetorical techniques vividly while keeping its original meaning.Finally,some long sentences are difficult to deal with.The translator needs to change the syntactic structure into Chinese style to express the meaning clearly.The translator uses different methods to solve these difficulties,for example,noting on biological words,lexical conversion,personification translation and reinventing sentence structures.Finally the translator summarizes this translation practice report and puts forward some experience and lessons.Because of the translator's limited ability,the understanding of the source text is not thoroughly enough.In the future the translator should continue to study to improve the translation ability.