| The original text of this translation report is extracted from a famous linguistic book Language Learnability and Language Development written by an American linguist Steven Pinker.It is one of the translation works providing basic references for a Sichuan provincial founded project.The translation content,about 25,000 words,is mainly based on the first two chapters of the book.The first chapter introduces the significance of language acquisition study for linguistics,and describes the research achievements of linguistics,especially the developmental psycholinguistics in the children’s language acquisition research.The second chapter summarizes the overall structure and theoretical foundations of acquisition theory,and justifies its hypotheses.The source text is academically,with highly specialized expression.It features with plain language without too many rhetorical devices.Its vocabularies are accurate and professional,containing a large number of linguistic terms;its sentences are mainly composed of compound sentences;and its texts are logic and carefully constructed,reflecting coherence.The heavy difficulties lying in the practice are as follows: how to translate linguistic terms correctly? How to translate complex sentences smoothly and logically? And how to keep the style of the translation close to the original text? To solve these issues properly,the translator read numerous linguistic texts,such as Linguistics: A Course Book,Cognitive Psychology,and did a lot of research on Pinker’s other works and their Chines versions.The translator also used Tmxmall,a translation software,establishing small-sized corpus and Termbase,which helped the translator solve these difficulties efficiently.In addition,the author also adopted some appropriate translation strategies including amplification,inversion.Finally,on the basis of Skopos theory,the author constructed an analysis framework and analyzed these difficulties in the form of case studies.It hopes that this report can provide guiding significance for the translation of such texts in the future. |
