A Report On The Translation Of The Chinese In America

This translation report is based on the English-to-Chinese translation of the book The Chinese in America.Written by the deceased Chinese American writer Zhang Chunru,it tries to describe the hard struggle of Chinese in America during the period of 1840 s to 1950 s.There are not only real stories but also unique literature value in this content.The present translation is mainly under the guidance of Eugene Nida's functional equivalence theory,emphasizing the target reader's feeling,pursing the same reading experience for all readers.Because of the historical facts and the writer's emotions expressed in the work,it is necessary to guarantee the accuracy of the historical events and requires the translator to bring the same reading experience to his new readers as the readers of the original text.In the process of translation,the conversion of part-of-speech of words and the change of sentence structures are used as two basic translation means to render English into Chinese.The two languages have different sentence structures.The Chinese language is a parataxis language,but the English language is a hypotaxis language.As a result,it is necessary to pay attention to the differences between the two languages.Therefore,in translation,it is necessary to convert English that emphasizes the overt structure into Chinese that often uses short sentence patterns.Lexically,the conversion of part-of-speech is unavoidable.The skillful use of part-of-speech translation technique can make the translation more smooth and natural.In addition,flexible translation is pursued and attempts are made to reproduce the original reading experience in the new version.Guided by Eugene Nida's translation theory,we take the characteristics of the text into consideration and try to create the same reading experience for the target readers by adopting flexible translation methods,aiming to guarantee the accuracy of the historical facts and the artistic value of the original text.All efforts are made to achieve a good translation.The report consists of four chapters.The first chapter “Task Description” tells the background information of the writer and her writing motivation,and briefly introduces the translation means used in practice.The second chapter “Task Procedure” shows the preparations for the task,specific plans,tools used for doing the work and communication with the supervisor.Chapter three,the main body of the report,provides the case analysis.It illustrates how the conversion of part-of-speech and the change of sentence pattern are skillfully used.The two languages have fundamental differences.It is necessary to make adjustments in order to make the target language smooth rather than confusing and obscure.The last chapter does some summary work,pointing to some questions needing further discussion and further research direction for the author is talked about.