A Translation Project Report On Our War With Spain For Cuba's Freedom(Excerpts)

This article is an English-Chinese translation project report.The translation materials are excerpted from Our War with Spain for Cuba's Freedom,which belongs to historical documentary literature,and whose author is Trumbull White——a famous American writer,historian and war correspondent.The author of this report selects chapter 11 to chapter 17(part)of the original text as the translation object for this report.The source text mainly describes the Spanish colonial government's brutal repression of Cuban uprising and massacre of Cuban civilians.The United States came to the aid of Cuba for its own economic interests in Cuba,but was rudely treated by Spain.Finally,it decided to fight against with Spain for colonies and overseas expansion,which was known as the Spain-American War.The part translated by the author of this report introduces the Ten Years' War of Cuba.It tells the story of the Cuban people who launched several revolts against Spanish enslavement,as well as the conflicts between the United States and Spain in the war.The language used in the source text is formal and idiomatic,and the sentence structure is rigorous.Furthermore,there are quite a few terminology,long and complex sentences and special sentence patterns.Therefore,the translators are supposed to correctly grasp the content of the original text and adopt appropriate translation strategies,so as to avoid the occurrence of the translationese,incoherence and unintelligibility in the target text caused by blindly following the writing style of the original text.With the Skopos Theory of Hans Vermeer as the theoretical basis,which includes the skopos rule,internal coherence and fidelity rule,the author of this report analyzes how to use appropriate strategies to solve difficulties from three aspects of vocabulary,syntax and discourse with examples as illustration,so as to achieve the coherence,fluency and readability of the translation on the basis of faithfulness to the content of the source text.The purpose of this dissertation is to provide some reference for readers who are interested in studying the Spanish-American War and translators whose translation materials are related with this topic.Meanwhile,the author of this report is deeply aware that there are some problems to be solved in the translation.Realizing that there is no end for the road of translation,the author of this report still needs to constantly accumulate experiences and improve translation skills so as to deal with translation difficulties with ease.