A Report On The E-C Translation Of English Colonization And Empire(Chapter 8-9)

This report is a translation practice report based on the historical text English Colonization and Empire.The book focuses on the overall description of British colonial history,highly summarizes the rise and fall of the British colonial empire from the aspects of economy,politics and culture.The book is written by a world-famous English historian Alfred Caldecott.Chapter VIII "Trade and Trade Policy" and Chapter IX "Supply of Labor" of this book were selected for translation and analysis.Chapter VIII provides a detailed description of trade and trade policies,and explores in depth the economic aspects of the commercial development of the colonies and the impact of changes in their policies on the colonial process,mainly about the strengths and weaknesses of the commercial union;the members of the commercial federation and the relationship between trade and politics.Chapter IX mainly describes the European colonies adopted five policies to meet the needs of colonial labor,which mainly involves slaves,coolies,free immigrants,and so on.Under the guidance of Peter Newmark's communicative translation theory,according to Newmark's classification of text,the translation material belongs to the informative text.Translators use various translation strategies flexibly to analyze the text from three levels:lexical,syntactic and textual level.In terms of lexical level,strategies such as conversion,amplification and omission are mainly used;at the syntactic level,combination and division are mainly used;at the textual level,repetition and cohesion are widely used.With the guidance of communication theory,the difficulties and obstacles encountered in the process of translation can be solved,the language of the translation is more fluent,and the translation also meets the requirements of the target readers.The report firstly introduces the background and significance of the translation task.Based on the analysis of the text from the lexical,syntactic and textual level and the requirements from the entrusting party,the translator gets to know the information about British trade and trade policy,labour and original author Alfred Caldecott's autobiography,scanning the references related to the communicative theory,and using paper dictionaries such as NAMES OF THE WORLD'S PEOPLES,NAMES OF THE WORLD'S PLACES,Lingoes,Bing Dictionary and other electronic dictionaries,as well as Google academic and CNKI online resources to analyze parallel texts.The translation for the names of places and people,as well as historical events before translation is based on a deep understanding of the specific time and background.The three proofreadings in the translation are designed to strictly control the quality of the translation.After the translation,the evaluation of the translation task by translator,peer,the supervisor and the entrusting party.Through this practice report,it can be found that communicative translation theory plays a vital role in the translation of historical texts.In view of the particularity of the historical text itself,its sentence structure and language expression do not follow the modern language rules,which leads to the source language complex and difficult to understand.Therefore,combined with the characteristics of historical texts,communicative translation theory can better guide and analyze text translation,make the unobstructed translation language infinitely close to the target readers to stimulate their interest in foreign historical texts,and further explore such texts.The translator also gained valuable translation experience from it,improve her translation ability and competency,and also hope to provide experience and help for other translators.