An Analysis Of Students' Translation Of American Political Decay Or Renewal?(Excerpts)

This thesis examines the first English to Chinse translation assignment done by a class of first-year students in the Master of Translation and Interpretation pro-gramme of a university in Beijing.The author categorises students' common mistakes under the Comprehension,Expression and Adaptation framework and provides solutions to each kind of the problems.This programme mainly uses non-literary texts for exercises.Students are required to fully understand the source texts through thorough research.In this thesis,non-literary texts are defined as informative or factual texts rather than fictional.Based on these features,the criteria for non-literary translation can be concluded as accuracy and fluency.By comparing students' translations,the author finds that most mistakes are made due to inadequate comprehension.This is because the translators have either poor background knowledge or English proficiency,which causes misunderstanding over pronouns,modifying relationships or words with multiple meanings.The former problem can be solved through research and the latter through better language proficiency.Expressions are unnatural because the source text is not "de-verbalised".If translators do not clearly understand the two languages' differences,especially those in the use of pronouns,articles and sentence structures,their translations are most likely to be unnatural.Adaptation is required for coherence or to highlight key information of the source texts.Students' translations are incoherent because they choose too small a translation unit.The thesis concludes that to achieve accuracy in translation,translators should read the source texts critically and do whatever possible to find out the author's exact intent;and to achieve fluency,translators need to know more about the linguistic differences between Chinese and English.