Common Problems Of And Solutions To English-Chinese Translation Of Reportage On Social Issues:

This essay is a translation report based on the translation of one of the 2015 New York Times bestsellers,Ghettoside:A True Story of Murder in America,also a Ridenhour Book Prize winner in 2016.The author of this book Jill Leovy,based on real people and events,integrated news report and literature skills to depict a great plague of black homicides in America in the perspective of social politics and legal background.The translation of foreign reportage in China dated back to the 1930s and enjoyed a prosperous development during the War of Resistance against Japan.It had profound impact on the evolvement of China's reportage,but the implications were concentrated in macro fields such as politics,war,and thought,and rarely focused on micro fields like social issues.Since the 21st century,hot-spot issues including social fairness and justice have become increasingly concerned.Therefore,the translation of this book may enable domestic readers to have a more intuitive and in-depth understanding of such issues as racism confronting American society.This report analyzed the characteristics of the book's text types,mixing news,narration and description together,and combined Newmark's text typology theory with semantic and communicative strategies to explore specific solutions to major problems encountered with different text types.At the lexical level,this report focused on the translation skills of names of people,places,police systems,gang names,street slangs and cultural vocabulary;at the sentence level,this report focused on a large number of comments appeared in the book,including direct and indirect quotations.At the discourse level,this report then focused on the descriptions of appearance,character,and natural and social landscape.This translation report indicated that a translator should apply text typology theory when translating reportage,remain faithful to the original text.At the same time,he or she is also required to adopt a flexible application of translation skills in response to different translating issues in order to produce qualified translation and coordinate the role of a commissioner(often a publisher),target language readers along with the translator him-or herself.