A Translation Report For Brotopia: Breaking Up The Boys' Club Of Silicon Valley (Chapter 4)

This report is based on the translation of Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley,a book written by an American journalist Emily Chang,in which she opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated Silicon Valley and reveals the real condition of women in technology field.Published by Portfolio Penguin in February,2018,this book proves to be an Instant National Bestseller in the United States,owing to its powerful expose of Silicon Valley.Numerous insiders have praised this thoughtful book.At present,any Chinese version of this book cannot be found in the market.Being a journalist,Emily Chang,has demonstrated her own journalist style in her writing incisively and vividly.Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley consists a number of conversations as well as data to prove its validity;moreover,the language of this book is rather colloquial and readable.However,taking conversations into consideration,some slang and colloquial words are involved consequently,which may cause some misunderstanding for readers and the translator.Firstly,this book depicts the working condition of women in tech,inevitably,sexual harassment is touched upon;since sexual words are not frequently seen in Chinese books,it will be a difficulty for translation.Besides,dialogues cover a wide page of this book,hence some slang and swear words can be found,the translator is supposed to find a way to translate them in a more nature way to ensure the readability for readers of the target culture.This report will be guided by the norm theory.Gideon Toury opines that translation is a social and cultural activity,and is restricted by social and cultural factors.From this,he comes up with the concept of “Translation Norms”.Translational norms are referred to as the general values and principles applied or exemplified in the process of translation.Given that this book involves slang,sexual descriptions and swear words,sanitization norms will be employed to make the transcript more palatable for target readers,which is realized through the adaptation of a source text.A series of translation strategies like omission,euphemism,literal translation,etc.can be utilized to eliminateor weaken those factors that go against the cultural mainstream,moral values,ideology and religious beliefs in target culture,including slang,sexual descriptions and swearwords.In this way,adaptation is realized and target readers are able to obtain more palatable reading experience.