A Report On The Translation Of Winning Arguments (Excerpts)

Winning Arguments is a new work,written by Stanley Fish,a New York Times bestselling author,a literary theorist and a law scholar.The book is highly valued by Financial Times,New York Magazine,New Republic and so on.Fish offers unique perspectives for readers in his book,but never makes any conclusion in his book.As a result,he illustrates some examples concerning political arguments from various aspects,rather than tell his readers how to win arguments.So far,the Chinese version of this book has not been published in China.This translation practice report mainly comprises two parts,namely,translation practice and translation report.Six sections of political arguments in chapter two,are chosen as the translation material,namely,“You Dirty Redskin!”,“To Torture or Not to Torture”,“The Improbable Triumph of Same-Sex Marriage”,“Bounded-Argument Space: How Scalia Foresaw the Slippery Slope”,“Abraham Lincoln,the Anti-Liberal”,and “the Declaration of Independence”.When translating proper nouns and terms,the translator employs both annotation and addition to bridge the social-cultural gap between Chinese readers and American readers so that the former can achieve the same reading effect as that obtained by the latter.In the process of translation,repetition,conversion of word class,diction and addition are adopted by the translator,for vocabularies utilized in target language run authentic.What' more,readers can achieve better reading comprehension.When translating sentences,the translator applies division,inversion,conversion between actives and passives to remove syntactical difficulties so that the sentences she has constructed are in line with authentic Chinese expressions.Upon the completion of her translation,the translator draws powerful lessons from the English-to-Chinese translation practice,that is,firstly,a translator is supposed to provide social background information for Chinese readers so that reading problems concerning Western culture could be resolved and the readability of this translation could be achieved.Secondly,owing to the differences existing between English and Chinese,translation strategies and techniques should be exercised skillfully to produce a pleasing translation version.This translation report explores problems encountered by the translator in the process of translation as well as the adopted techniques,which can be of referential significance to political argument translation.However,not all difficulties about political argument translation can be referred to in this translation report since the translator only finished about 15,000 words.Thus,the translator is supposed to pursue her translation to better her translation report.