A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of West African Countries-The Republic Of Ghana(Chapter Three)

This report is based on the English-Chinese translation of the third chapter of West African Countries — The Republic of Ghana.The project is initiated by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the book series are written by researchers at the University of Ghana.The Center for West African Studies of University of Electronic Science and Technology of China participates in translating the contents.The third chapter of the book,which the author of this report is entrusted to translate,is about politics,introducing the country's constitutional development,the 1992 Fourth Republican Constitution,and its local and regional government.Christiane Nord proposes a translation-oriented text analysis model and emphasizes on the influence of intratextual and extratextual factors of the source text on translation and classifies translation types into the documentary and instrumental translation.Under the guidance of the two translation types,the report analyzes the chorographic features of the source text,as well as its intratextual and extratextual factors.Through the analysis of specific examples,the report points out that,the translation of this chorographic text mainly features the instrumental translation supplemented by the documentary translation.The documentary translation preserves the characteristics of the source text and culture while the instrumental translation increases the readability of the target text and is more understandable to target readers.To be specific,literal translation and annotations are employed in the documentary translation to preserve the original imagery and reproduce the linguistic and(or)cultural features in the source text.As for the instrumental translation,translation methods such as addition,conversion,negation,and division are taken to enhance readability and understandability.The documentary and instrumental translation are flexibly combined to preserve the original imagery and achieve readability simultaneously for culture-loaded expressions and proper names.It is a new attempt to apply Nord's translation-oriented text analysis model to the translation of a chorography.This report analyzes and summarizes the features of this kind of genre and puts forward some translation solutions through specific examples to offer certain suggestions and reference to future translation of the same kind of texts.