On E-C Translation Of Narrative Non-Fiction

This translation report is based on the translation practice of five chapters of Camps and Trails in Old China.As one of the voluntary translation projects initiated by Yeeyan Gutenberg Project,this book is written by the American adventurist and naturalist—Roy Chapman Andrews.The book embraces the social realities and customs of the south and west of China in the early 20 th century.It involves a great number of remote and little-known areas,making it difficult to back translate the names of these places.It also features many idiomatic phrases and complicated sentences which bring about difficulties to translation due to the differences in syntactic structures and in ways of expression between English and Chinese.This report follows the principles of semantic and communicative translation proposed by Newmark.He maintains that semantic or communicative translation deals with the translation of different text types,which are classified into three major categories: expressive,informative and vocative.The two translation theories supplement each other as both stresses the importance of delivering the overall meaning of the original and conforming to the language features of the target language.Camps and Trails in Old China is a serious non-fiction work of literature and semantic translation is mainly adopted to be as close as to the original text in terms of writing style and overall meaning while communicative translation is applied as assistance to produce appropriate effect.The difficulties of the translation practice are classified into three categories: words and phrases,subdivided into culture-loaded expression and abstract nouns;sentences,which are further analyzed from perspectives of complex,compound-complex and multiple-complex;and sentence groups.Under the guidance of semantic and communicative translation,verification,transliteration,idiomatic translation,paraphrasing and conversion are used to the translation of words and phrases;embedding,cutting,inversing,splitting,inserting and reorganizing are applied to the translation of complicated sentences;and reiterating and reorganizing are adopted to the translation of sentence groups.