A Report On The E-C Translation Of The World Crisis, 1911-1918 (Excerpt)

Memoir,as a narrative text genre,refers to memories of different important events experienced by the writer or other people.Owing to its unique language style of reproducing objective history,memoir enjoys the best advantage of providing valuable historical references for researchers.The World Crisis,1911-1918 written by Winston Churchill,is the exactly classical works of this text genre.This famous book has been regarded not only as a full-length and panoramic historical works,but also an outstanding book authentically reporting events in The First World War.Therefore,it is indispensable to the study from the perspectives of sciences of history,military affairs and international politics.Based on the translation practice of two chapters(Chapter XXX----Chapter XXXI)in The World Crisis,1911-1918,this report mainly focuses on the text characteristics to explore proper translation theories and skills,and finally accomplish the task authorized by the entrusting party.There are five parts in this report.The first part is introduction,which introduces background information of translation task.Task description is the second part.Source text analysis and requirements from the entrusting party are described in this part.According to the text typology raised by Katharina Reiss,an outstanding German translator of functional school,the source text can be classified as informative text.Furthermore,the lexical features,syntactic features and discourse features of the source text are further elaborated in this part.The third part is the detailed description of the complete translation process(before translation,while translation and after translation),including preparation for background information,translation tools,guided translation theories and skills,quality control,process description and evaluation.In the fourth part----case analysis,the translator analyzes the source text under the guidance of Skopos Theory from the following three aspects.They are words,sentences and discourse respectively.As for translation of words,this report focuses on word conversion from the perspective of language differences both in Chinese and English.Besides,translation of military terms should be attached great importance to when translating.Translation of sentences include sentences in passive voice and those long and complex sentences.Finally,specific translation examples are used to thoroughly analyze the unity and coherence of the discourse translation.The last part is conclusion,which summarizes unsolved problems,related reflection and implication for future study.The present translation report indicates that when translating memoir,the translator should have aclear understanding of its unique language style.At the same time,information of the source text should be conveyed faithfully and accurately.Therefore,the translator is required to enhance translation theory study,enrich bilingual knowledge and have a good command of aided translation tools.And the translator hopes that this report will provide some referential value for the memoir genre translation.