A Report On The Translation Of How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction (Excerpts)

This is a report on an English-Chinese translation practice.The source text for the translation practice is selected from How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction,which is co-authored by David Machin and Andrea Mayr.So far,no Chinese version has been found.The first two chapters are selected,which mainly introduce some basic theoretical concepts in source text and basic lexical analysis of a range of texts.In this report,some translation difficulties are solved under the guidance of Catford's translation shifts,such as tenses of verbs,words and phrases,parts of speech,attributive clauses,appositive clauses,and the cohesion and coherence of text.In view of these difficulties,the translator adopts relevant translation methods from the lexical level,the syntactic level and the textual level to solve these difficulties.At lexical level,under the guidance of level shifts,unit shifts and class shifts,the translator uses adding,substituting and converting to solve difficulties involving tenses of verbs,words and phrases,and parts of speech.At syntactic level,under the guidance of structural shifts and unit shifts,the translator adopts recasting and converting to solve difficulties such as some difficult attributive clauses and appositive clauses.At textual level,under the guidance of unit shifts,adding and cutting are used to achieve the cohesion and coherence of text.The translator expects that the translated text of the first two chapters can contribute to the further translation of the later chapters,and can enrich the way for Chinese readers to understand multimodal critical discourse analysis.Moreover,the translator wants to do some efforts for the development of multimodal critical discourse analysis in China.