A Translation Report On Higher Education In The Era Of The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Excerpt)

This thesis is based on the English-Chinese translation of the first two chapters of Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,an academic book about higher education.Guided by text typology theory and communicative translation theory of Peter Newmark,this thesis analyzes the characteristics and translation process of the source text.Firstly,by using text type theory,the translator explores the text type of original text and finds out it belongs to informative one for it focuses on the statement of facts and viewpoints.Then the language of source text is discussed at lexical,syntactic and discourse level.Before translation,three parallel texts in English,Chinese and bilingual respectively are selected to offer some references for the current translation in terms of translation theory,translation strategies and expressions.Then the report examines problems in translation and gives corresponding solutions to those problems.Those difficulties include educational terminologies like “Education 3.0” and compound words such as “credit-bearing” at lexical level as well as double dashes in long sentences and quotations at syntactic level.To tackle these problems,the translator mainly uses liberal translation on the basis of communicative translation theory so that readers can grasp the accurate idea of the author.To be specific,amplification,footnote and annotation are employed in the translation of terminologies while omission and amplification are used to deal with compound words.Double dashes are preserved,converted to other punctuations or replaced by phrases.Quotations are translated by the change of word order in order to make renderings conform to the expression pattern of target language without following the form of source text.The current translation practice presents the characteristics and translation methods of educational texts by the analysis and discussion of the above four difficulties so that this thesis can provide possible references for subsequent translation practice of informative text about higher education.