Translation Report On Research Methods In Second Language Acquisition: A Practical Guide

The source text of this translation project is Research Methods in Second Language Acquisition: Practical Guide.From 1960 s to 1970 s,Second Language Acquisition(SLA)had been an independent discipline and it is fast-developing in recent 50 years in the worldwide.SLA is interdisciplinary in virtue of absorbing many theories and research methods from other fields such as linguistics,psychology,etc.The subject is not only instructive for language teaching,but also be significant for language and cognitive development.With the development of SLA research,scholars have laid emphasis on the optimization of research methods.This book introduces many research methods which can be implemented in SLA,which provides comprehensive guide for SLA research beginners.This report consists of five parts.The first part introduces the background,significance and content of the source text.It is about SLA research methods which can provide step by step guide for research beginners such as graduate students or other people who are interested in SLA.The following part is about translation theories.Text typology theory and communicative translation and semantic translation theory have been beneficial to translation practice in this project.In text typology theory,texts have been fall into three categories,informative text,vocative text and expressive text.The source text is informative text on account of its academic content and textbook format,therefore the principle of authenticity first should be followed in translation process.Peter Newmark who had put forwarded the text typology theory considered that communicative is more suitable for informative texts while he also thought that the method of combing communicative and semantic translations is ideal way to process source texts.As a result,the report holds an opinion that either semantic or communicative translation should be adopted,as the case may be.The third section describes the translation task.The source text is academic.As an informative text,it has its own characteristics.At lexical level,it has many terminologies and abstract nouns.As its about research methods,there are many tables and figures in it.At syntactic level,many passive sentences and attributive clauses appear.At textual level,the main focus is cohesion and coherence of the translated texts.In translation,under the guidance of Text Typology theory and semantic and communicative translation method,the translator used many translation techniques such as addition,conversion,combination and so on.As for case study part,this report discussed translation difficulties from three aspects.The translation of terminologies,abstract nouns,table and figures,passive sentences and attributive clauses and discourse translation will be included.The author made a summary in the final part.The author had benefited greatly from this translation practice.The characteristics and translation method and techniques of academic texts had been learned about.The translator has realized that only one kind of translation method cannot solve all problems in translating process.