A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Elephants And Kings-An Environmental History (Excerpts)

This is an English to Chinese translation report.The selected original works is from the famous American writer Thomas R.Trautmann's Elephants and Kings: An Environment history.It is a book on environment history with rigorous structure and objective language.Excerpts from chapter 6 are selected to translate and mainly introduce the spreading of war elephants in Near East,North Africa and Europe,which not only has academic value to a certain degree,but also some enlightenment for the future.For this report,the source text is first defined as the social science text,what's more,in light of language features of the source text and under the guidance of Reiss' s Text Type Theory,the source text should belong to the content-focused text.According to the accuracy and smoothness principles of content-focused text,the report lays emphasis on the analysis of the difficulties in translation and their corresponding translation methods.The difficulties lie in both the translation of part of speech,polysemy,proper nouns,weapon terms and long complex sentences.To achieve accuracy,the translator converses part of speech according to the context,determines the words meaning in the context,adds footnotes to translate proper nouns and adds footnotes with illustrations to translate weapon terms.As for the long complex sentences,the translator adopts linear translation,hysteron proteron,reinventing sentences structure and omission to achieve smoothness.Under the guidance of Reiss' s Text Type Theory,the report follows the principles of “accuracy” and “smoothness” to conform to the Chinese expression and adapt to the target readers.The translation practice enriches the translator's knowledge about the spreading and development of the war elephants,and the relationship between human beings and environment.Then the present report enables the author to realize the importance of the relationship between theory and translation practice.In the meanwhile,the adoption of the translation methods helps to ensure the accuracy and smoothness of the target text.