A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of The Landslide Handbook

The Landslide Handbook-A Guide to Understanding Landslides is entrusted to the author by the State Key Laboratory of Geohazard Prevention and Geoenvironment Protection of Chengdu University of Technology,aiming at strengthening the domestic scholars' knowledge of foreign geological literatures and strengthening the basic understanding of normal people in geological disasters.This report is based on the translation of the handbook about 20,412 words,which is the part the author translated.The handbook is classified into geological scientific text,and different from literary translation,this type of texts has its own characteristics.Also,Chinese differs from English greatly in terms of using habits and features.All of these lead to many difficulties in the translation process.Linguistic features and characteristics of the original text are introduced and analyzed in the pre-translation.The author analyzes the difficulties from the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels and corresponding translation skills and methods by giving examples under the guidance of Eugene Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory during translation.At the lexical level,a great number of geological terms are included in the original text due to the high expertise.After reviewing the professional dictionary,the author also refers to the parallel texts before selecting the appropriate target language.At the syntactic level,passive sentences,nominalized structures,and long and difficult complex sentences are widely used in original text,for which the author adopts the skills of voice shifting,part-of-speech transformation,division and reorganization.At the discourse level,in order to avoid duplication or emphasize the key point,repetition and omission exist in the original text largely.In response to deal with expression difference between Chinese and English,the author employs the skills of amplification and omission in the translation for a better understanding of target readers.Besides,from the perspective of cohesion and coherence of the translation,the author adopts the skills of amplification and repetition to increase the fluency and clarity of the target language,which would be much more convenient for the readers of the translation.This report analyzes and summarizes the author's project,and indicates the great value of guidance of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory in geological scientific texts translation,which will be regarded as references for translation in the future.