| Language reports,a concept proposed by Thompson in 1996 for the identification of"signalled voices in text",refer to not only the familiar direct speech and indirect speech,but also many other examples which clearly involve reporting someone else’s language but do not fall into traditional categories.As an important feature in literary as well as non-literary texts,language reports themselves have generated great academic interest and been studied from various approaches and perspectives.Admittedly,the existing investigations mostly focus on the language reports in literary texts,but there are some studies in the use of language reports in academic discourse and news reporting.Nevertheless,language reports,as a whole,have received sustained attention and are well investigated to some extent.However,the investigation of the translation of language reports from English to Chinese,especially the non-literary texts,is quite limited.The paper is based on the translating practice of language reports in the Chapter 13 of the book The English and Their History.Written by the Professor of History at Cambridge,Robert Tombs,the book is remarkably well-informed yet still elegant and readable,and enormous language reports in various kinds,including citations,quotations,excerpts of poems or essays and so on,have been employed meticulously by Tombs.In the translating process,these language reports have brought me many problems for the linguistic differences between Chinese and English in reporting.Based on the analysis of my own translating practice,the paper proposes five techniques in translating language reports:1)repositioning reporting clause;2)adding reporting clause;3)generalizing reporting verbs;4)adjusting quotes;and 5)borrowing the existing translation.The last one is applied to excerpts of literary texts such as Charles Dickens’ novels which have already been translated and published previously and the existing translation of which can also be fitted into the TL text. |
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