Selected E-C Translation Of The Remarkable Chester Ronning:Proud Son Of China (p.89-122) And A Critical Commentary

As a prominent diplomat,politician and educator,Chester A.Ronning not only witnessed the overwhelming changes of China in the past decades but also contributed a lot to provoking Canada to admit the Red China’s position in the international community and to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Canada and China.The source text of this project,The Remarkable Chester Ronning: Proud Son of China,is the first English biography featuring Mr.Chester Ronning.Therefore,the translation of it into Chinese means a lot in many aspects historically and internationally.This project consists of two parts.The first one covers the selected chapters of the source text,i.e.the end of Chapter 4 Principle and Politician and Chapter 5 Diplomat in China,and their Chinese translations.The second part is the critical commentary produced based on the translation practice.It first introduces the source text and its significance.Second,the Skopos theory of Hans J.Vermeer is discussed as the theoretical guidance.Moreover,it is pointed out that the strategy of “Compensation” introduced by Prof.Liu Miqing is also applied in the process of translation.Last but not least,the author analyses several cases both at the lexical level and at the syntactical level.These examples demonstrate the translation practice under the guidance of the Skopos theory with the strategy of Compensation.In conclusion,the Skopos theory takes translational action as the object whose purpose is decisive on the translation strategies and means.Thus,translators are given more freedom to deal with their translation projects.Meanwhile,the theory takes both linguistic features and culture into consideration.Consequently it works well for texts such as the biography that features both authenticity and literariness.With the help of the strategy of compensation,the typical translationese in English-Chinese translation can be greatly decreased.Hence,the translatum,according to the Skopos theory,can be more acceptable and with the assessment of the rules of the Skopos theory,a functionally adequate translatum can be produced.