A Report On The Translation Of The Second Chapter Of Translation Studies (Third Edition)

As an independent discipline,translation studies have always been a point for debate.However,as for the translation studies,many theorists and scholars just rest on linguistic level from the very beginning to 1950 s,and they put much emphasis on the study of translation techniques.Till 1970 s,the “ Cultural Turn” put forwarded by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere offers a new perspective for translation studies,which makes translation studies shift from linguistic level to cultural level.The“Cultural Turn” means that on the basis of text equivalence,stress has been laid on the contexts of target language and other cultural-bound factors to keep cultural connotations of target language and promote cultural sharing as opposed to text conversion on linguistic level.This report is based on the second chapter of Translation Studies(Third Edition)written by Susan Bassnett.Through retrospecting the translation history of western countries,the report mainly focuses on how the role and function of translation have varied in different periods,and the formation and development of translation methods.According to Peter Newmark's text-type theory,this text belongs to informative text which focuses on “authenticity”.The first factor in all informative texts is to follow the principle of “authenticity-first”,paying much attention to what the author wants to convey rather than how the author speaks.Therefore the translator employs semantic translation as the secondary strategy and communicative translation as the main strategy,and analyzes the important and difficult points on lexical-level,syntactic-level,textual-level and cultural-level based on relevant translation theories,methods and techniques.At last,the translator summarizes the whole report,including gains and limitations.