An E-C Translation Report On Born In Africa: The Quest For The Origins Of Human Life (Chapters 2-5)

This is an English – Chinese translation report.The source text is selected from the book Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life written by Martin Meredith.It is a story about the exploration on the human origin in Africa by some paleoanthropologists,paleontologists and scientists who believe in and take pains to prove that human beings originated from Africa.The book was published in May 10,2011,and the translator has not found any Chinese version of it till now.The report is based on the translation of the book(chapters 2-5).These four chapters principally focus on the work of three paleoanthropologists and scientists with their teams finding important fossils of the early men in Africa,and their discoveries play important roles on the research of human origin.The translation report chiefly analyzes difficulties in the process of translation and the corresponding translation methods.Difficulties in the process of translation in general include those at lexical level such as translation of polysemous words,culture-loaded words and parts of speech;and those at syntactic level such as translation of complex sentences and compound-complex sentences.To deal with those difficulties,the translator read many a relevant literature and consulted a large number of books about translation methods so that she could find appropriate methods.Eventually,the translator adopted the methods of diction,semantic extension,transliteration and annotation and conversion at lexical level;and cutting,recasting,reversing and following the original syntactic order at syntactic level.In the completion of the translation practice,the translator has not only obtained the knowledge of human origin,but also reviewed many translation methods during the translation.It could be conductive to improving herself in translation competence and capacity of analyzing and solving problems.The translator hopes that thetranslation of the book Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life can possibly provide some references for those who are interested in the study of human origin and some help to those who might have translated this book into Chinese in the future.