A Report On The Translation Of Vodka Politics(Chapter 4-7)

This report is based on the translation of Mark Lawrence Schrad's Vodka Politics: Alcohol,Autocracy,and the Secret History of the Russian State(Chapter 4-7),and it has summarized the translation techniques that the translator has applied under the guidance of the Communicative Translation Theory.Reviewing the role that alcohol has played in the political events across Russian history,Schrad argues in his masterpiece that Russia' debilitating societal alcoholism in its essence is not a result of genetic code,but the consequence of their autocratic political system that has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft.Based on the analysis of the stylistic features of the source text and the expectation from the target readers,the translator has applied Newmark's Communicative Translation Theory as the guiding theory in his translation practice.Under its guidance,the translator has applied various translation techniques to solve problems encountered during translation and conduct post-translation quality control.In the semantic level,the translator mainly applied techniques like Semantic Extension,Semantic Explication and Semantic Adaptation to replicate the expressive results of the source text in the target language.Meanwhile,in the syntactic level,the translator mostly applied techniques like Turning Phrases into Clauses,Reinventing Sentence Structures and Reframing Discourses to render the translation more reader-friendly to its target readers.This translation practice is of enormous significance to the translator and author of this report,providing invaluable guidance in his future translation of texts of similar themes.Moreover,this report has provided references for translators who intend to conduct translation under the guidance of the Communicative Translation Theory.In addition,Vodka Politics: Alcohol,Autocracy,and the Secret History of the Russian State throws new light on domestic studies on Russia.Admittedly,due to the author's limited academic knowledge and practice,there remains room for improvement in the depth and breadth of the case study in this translation report.