A Report On The Translation Of The Bilingual Edge (Excerpts)

This paper is a report of the translation of the first,the second,and the fifth chapter of The Bilingual Edge: Why,When,and How to Teach Your Children a Second Language.To guarantee a correct understanding of the book,the author will also translate the introduction and the conclusion parts.This book is written by Kendall King and Alison Mackey,two linguistics professors at Georgetown University.This book talks about why,when and how to teach young children to learn a second language.The selected three chapters are about how young children can benefit from the bilingual edge,the misconceptions about learning a second language,and how individual differences influence young children's second language learning.The author selects these three topics as the source text of translation because they play an important role in children's second language learning.The source text of this practice is an informative text,aiming to transmit the information of children's second language learning.Readers' understanding of the basic information is therefore one of the major focuses of this translation practice.So the present author selects Peter Newmark's communicative translation theory as the guiding theory of this translation practice.To guarantee a thorough understanding of the source text,the author read a lot of relevant linguistic books as well as the source text.Many different translation skills or strategies were also utilized to better meet the goal of communicative translation.During the translation,the author marked the difficult translation points while translating and put forward resolutions for their translation.The translated version was proofread five times by the author,some translation peers and the author's supervisor together.The present paper gives a complete description of the above translation process,with an emphasis on all the translation difficulties at three different language levels,namely the lexical level,the sentence level and the textual level.It also provides a clear explanation on how the present author adopted different translation methods and techniques to solve these translation difficulties.This paper consists of four parts.The first part is introduction,including the description of the translation practice,the introduction of source text,the purpose and significance of the project and the structure of this paper.The second part mainly introduces the theoretical foundation and practice process.The third part focuses on the difficulties in the practice andhow to adopt different translation methods and techniques to solve translation difficulties at the lexical level,the sentence level and the textual level.The fourth part summarizes the experience gained in this translation practice,and points out the aspects that need to be further improved.