An E-C Translation Report On Indianapolis:The True Story Of The Worst Sea Disaster In U.S.Naval History And The Fifty-Year Fight To Exonerate An Innocent Man (Excerpts)

This is an English-Chinese translation report based on the translation of Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S.Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man,coauthored by American writer Lynn Vincent,the New York Times best seller,and Sara Vladic,the American famous film maker.The translator selected Book One and Prologue for translation task.The whole story of the text was mainly about USS Indianapolis,a Portland-Class heavy cruiser in WW2,and her Captain Charles MacVay.On her return after the mission,USS Indianapolis was torpedoed and sunk down by a Japanese submarine.Due to the negligence in management of US Navy,most survivors of the sinking were killed by dehydration,injury,and shark attack in the following days.The skipper of the ship,Charles MacVay ?,was charged for a lapse of command.Captain Charles MacVay could not tolerate the blame and committed a suicide,even though he was innocent.It took nearly 50 years,spanning thirteen American presidents,for the survivors to exonerate their captain.The source text is a non-fictional book with a military feature,which describes the real events in history according to official documents and interviews from survivors.So the text can be professional and,the writers depicted the characters in detail and vividly to reflect how the Pacific War and the navy disaster affected the crews in the ship.With the translation of the text,the target readers could get access to contents about the Pacific War and US navy history.Besides,the translator's ability can be improved in some way through translation.In the process of translation,the translator encountered problems at three levels: lexical level,syntactical level,textual level.The corresponding translation methods can be found after analyzing difficulties at three levels.Military terms,navy slangs,and names of military officers and geographic places are the lexical difficulties,the translator adopts annotation,zero translation,free translation,semantic translation.Long sentences related to military history,sentences with vivid description of characters are syntactic difficulties.Then the translator applies amplification,adjustment of sentence order,omission,usage of four-character expressions,division.Textual cohesion is the textual difficulties which the translator applies the translation method of substitution and adding conjunctive words.In addition,the writers use a diagram in the text,which contains many military messages and terms as explanation the difficulty is increased words.The difficulty of translating the source text is increased,then the translator adopts the standard translation as a solution.Through these translation methods,the translation can be faithful,precise and closer to linguistic habits.Finally,the translation concluded the major findings,limitations and suggestions.