A Translation Project Report On Dirt To Soil(Excerpts)

This is a translation project report.The source text Dirt 1o Soil,mainly about agricultural production,is written by an American farmer named Gabe Brown.The writer is regarded as a pioneer of the soil health movement in America.Based on his own experience,the writer,not only discusses five principles to maintain soil health in his book,but also proposes measures to improve agricultural production in a healthy and effective way.The translator believes that the writer's farming practices will be of great significance to the domestic agricultural practice.The original text is written in agricultural English,which will pose several difficulties to the translator in the following translation practice.On the lexical level,the major difficulties lies in the translation of the names of people,book titles and many professional terms in agriculture.On the sentence level,the translator encountered difficulties in the understanding of difficult sentences.Owing to no prior exposure to the translation of agricultural English,it was difficult for the translator to truly grasp the accurate information of these difficult sentences in the source text,and then to explain them in the target language smoothly and fluently.Aiming at these difficulties,the translator chose Eugene A.Nida's "functional equivalence" theory as a guide for the translation practice.Under the guidance of "functional equivalence"theory,the translator adopted translation methods,including amplification,reverse speech and conversion of parts of speech,in order to achieve functional equivalence between the original text and the target text.From this translation practice,the translator has not only exercised translation abilities,but also gained experience and lessons,which the translator believes will be of great value for translation practice in the future.