A Report On The Translation Of Paper: Paging Through History (Excerpts)

Excerpted from the second and fourth chapter of Paper: Paging through History composed by Mark Kurlansky,an American nonfiction author,the source text of this translation report combine both literary and non-literary features with the narration of distinctive history of paper to the general readers.Issues like how a piece of paper was made and taken as an alternative more effective than bamboo and silk,and finally be ubiquitous in our daily life,are shown and described in the work with ineffable history nature.The source text inevitably involves a galaxy of knowledge with fields like commerce,economy,culture,science,etc.Starting from its text type,the source text is analyzed and deconstructed lexically,syntactically,and textually,under the guidance of skopos theory from the perspective of skopos rule,fidelity rule and coherence rule.The abundant knowledge the author harnesses amazed the translator for sure,but a certain amount of facts,including specific year,background story of some authors and works,and even the place of origin of xuan paper,are mistakenly penned down.The Skopos,in some ways,urges to bring these errors to rectification so that the target readers would be less hampered and propose less negative criticism.And that is what a translator and a translation work should serve.