A Translation Practice Report Of Long And Difficult Sentences In Social Empathy:The Art Of Understanding Others Under The Guidance Of The Skopos Theory

With the rapid development of globalization,China and foreign countries have also witnessed deepened cultural communication.In this context,translation,as a bridge of interpersonal communication,plays an important role in cultural exchanges around the world.However,linguistic differences are widely existed in Chinese and English: Chinese sentence patterns are loose with short sentences;while in English,there are many long sentences and compound sentences.A proper solution to these problems can give full play to the role of the “bridge” and facilitate people-to-people exchanges.This paper is a translation practice report based on the first chapter of Social Empathy: The Art of Understanding Others written by Elizabeth A.Segal,an American social policy analyst.The difficulty of the selected materials is the translation of long and difficult sentences.Guided by the Skopos Theory,the translator can effectively eliminate linguistic differences and reproduce the feature of the source language.This corresponds with the needs of translating long and complicated sentences in this report.Therefore,under the guidance of this theory,the author analyzes the influence of its three rules,namely skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule.With the combination of the theory and translation practice,five skills including amplification,conversion,division,inversion and free translation are used to cope with long and difficult sentences.After finishing this translation practice and thesis writing,on the one hand,the translator hopes to deepen the understanding on the Skopos Theory and to improve the translation ability and efficiency;on the other hand,the translator aims to provide some strategies and references for future translation of similar materials.