A Reprot On The Translation Of Popular History Of Mexico(Chapters 1-4)

Popular History of Mexico is a book of historical literature written by Frederick Albion Ober,who is an American naturalist and author.This book mainly talks about the origin of the Mexicans,the forming and development of early civilizations and the social culture during the reign of the Viceroys.In this translation practice,the translator chooses Chapter 1 to 4 of this book as the source text.Historical literature features both historicity,creativity and artistry.The source text is mainly about the original Mexican nation,and its development and evolution,and there are many legends and fairy tales,in which show us vivid description of different gods.As an important part of Central America culture,these fairy stories are of great significance to the target language readers to learn the local traditions and customs of Central America,such as traditional concepts,religious system and the rituals.Based on the guidance of cultural translation theory,the translator takes cultural factors into full consideration in the whole process of translation,which is regarded as cultural information transmission instead of language symbol conversion.Thence,the translator finds a large number of materials that involves historical and cultural background about ancient Mexicans as reference.Meanwhile,in the process of selecting words and polishing sentences according to the context,the translator tries to analyze the cultural information of the original text by grasping cultural differences between English and Chinese,in order to make the version conformed to the habits of expression of the target language.This translation report consists of five sections,namely,the description of this translation task,the whole process of translation,the introduction of translation theory,difficulties and case analysis,summarize and introspection of the practice.The translator gives priority to the fourth part,which bring difficulties to the translation as a result of lacking cultural background knowledge,incomprehension of sentence structure and misunderstanding of logical relations.Moreover,specific analysis from aspects of words,sentences and the coherence in paragraphs and passages were made during the theses writing.Finally,the translator sums up the translation practice in order to make greater progress in the future.