A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Retirement Counseling:A Practical Guide For Action(Excerpts)

Along with social-economic development,vigorous progress in medical and health technology and the general improvement in people's living standard,the average life expectancy has been prolonged year by year.Then,the aging of population has become one of the bugbears which perplex many countries.China,a country with the largest population in the world,holds a large population base of the older people,and faces a more serious problem of population aging.Concern about the issue of retirement and studies on how to raise the happiness index of retirees will be conducive to promoting social harmony and stability.This translation practice report studies the E-C translation of retirement-counseling text,a book titled Retirement Counseling:A Practical Guide for Action.Chapter VII and Chapter IX of the book are a detailed introduction of time allocation for retirees as well as the economic security of them.The author chooses these chapters as the source text of this translation practice project.The difficult points lie in the translation of proper names including the names of some unique programs,American agencies and financial terms and that of the sentences with inanimate subjects,passive sentences,complex sentencesas well as the realization of textual cohesion.Under the guidance of Newmark's communicative translation theory,in translating proper nouns and terms,the author adopts literal translation,annotation,and zero translation to ensure the translated terms are concise,standardized and fully transmit their concepts.While translating sentences,the author uses the methods of conversion between actives and passives,division,reversing,and amplification to deal with syntactical difficulties so that the translation text will comply with the Chinese syntactic norms.What's more,at the discourse level,the author applies such devices of reference cohesion as personal pronouns omission and demonstrative pronouns replacement,and the adjustment of explicit and implicit logical relationship.These can help to achieve the coherence of the textual discourse and thus Chinese readers can have a better reading comprehension of the translated text.The translation of American retirement materials will inevitably involve some social background vocabularies.Therefore,the translator needs to provide the target readers with some social and cultural background knowledge so that reading problems concerning culture could be resolved.In the process of translating,a translator should bear accuracy and fluency in mind and see it as the core standards of the translation.The purpose of translation is to achieve the communicative effects of the original text,thus realizing the communicative functions of the source language.The translation of Retirement Counseling:A Practical Guide for Action,on the one hand may help to attract concern from all walks of society about the retirement of the older persons,to popularize the relevant knowledge of retirement.On the other hand,it is also conducive to providing references and retirement guidance for the retirees,pre-retirees and counselors in this regard,so it certainly has some social value.