Report On The Translation Of Einstein’s War(Excerpt) From The Perspective Of The Communicative Translation

This translation report is based on the English-to-Chinese translation of a biography entitled Einstein’s War:How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I(excerpt.hereinafter,Einstein ’s War).which introduces the life experience of Einstein.the development of the Relativity Theory,and the key persons involved and is also a brief record of WWI.Literary works about Einstein have attracted domestic readers’ attention,of which the biography is the focus.Thus,Einstein ’s War is chosen as the original text for this translation practice.During the translation process,there are two major problems.The first one is how to translate expressions showing cultural default.Since there are hidden messages about Western cultures in these expressions,no Chinese equivalencies could be found for them.If translated word for word,they will confuse the readers.To solve this problem,the amplification skill is utilized to reveal the hidden background information to readers.The second problem is how to translate the long parenthetical structures.The original text uses abundant such structures for detailed explanation.However,this structure is seldom used in Chinese writings.If they remain unchanged in the translation,it will go against the reading habits of Chinese readers.To avoid this situation,the skill of sentence reorganization is applied to cope with sentences having this structure.The report has chosen 20 typical sentences from the original text and adopted the two skills mentioned above in the translation process.Under the guidance of the communicative translation,the report has proved the applicability of the two skills and drawn the conclusion that they are useful for helping the translation achieve the communicative effect.Besides,the report has identified some room for translation improvement in the hope of providing a reference for future translation of biographies.