Translation Of Academic Texts From The Perspective Of Text Typology Theory

This paper is a study report on translation strategies of the academic text from the perspective of Reiss' s text typology theory.The translator selects the first two chapters of the book The Pragmatics of Politeness,written by British linguist Geoffrey Leech,as the study object,aiming to explore the guiding significance and applicability of text typology theory to the translation of academic texts,as well as to analyze the specific translation methods and strategies of this academic work from the perspective of text typology theory.Text typology theory involves text type,language function and translation strategy,which was firstly proposed by the German functionalist Katharina Reiss.The theory is mostly based on the idea of three functions of language put forward by Karl Bühler in the 1930 s.Reiss further developed Bühler's theory model and categorized texts into three types on the basis of their main functions: the informative text,the expressive text and the operative text.According to Reiss,text functions,together with their language features,determine the choice of the translation strategies.The selected material of this paper is an academic work on linguistics,which belongs to the category of informative text.Reiss holds that informative texts are content-focused,the main function of which is stating facts,expressing information and knowledge,thus requiring translators to transfer all the information concisely;meanwhile,she also proposes two criteria for evaluating a content-focused text: the target text must be faithfully represented,and the linguistic forms of the translation should be concise and conform to the expression norms of the target language.Through analyzing the guiding significance of text typology theory applied to the translation,this paper mainly discusses the specific application of text typology theory to the translation of informative text.Specifically,the translator mainly studies the translation of terminology,common expressions,nominalization,attributive clauses and parentheses from lexical and syntactic levels,and puts forward some specific translation methods to meet the translation requirements of academic work based on the differences between Chinese and English.The translation practice also has verified that text typology theory does perform a significant function in helping translators analyze the text function and choose appropriate translation strategies,especially for the translation of academic texts that are content-centered.