On Readability Of E-C Translation At The Lexical And Syntactic Level

This report is based on the translation practice of A History of The Ancient Near East,ca.3000-323 BC,written by Professor Marc Van De Mieroop,an specialist in ancient Near Eastern history.This book consists of 15 chapters,divided into an introduction and three parts: Part I City-States,Part II Territorial States and Part III Empires.The study object “Part I” introduces the development in the era of city-states with the focus on political centralization,where a large number of proper nouns that are unique to the Near Eastern civilization,like names,places,unit of weight and currency,as well as some long sentences are employed,which have been major obstacles in translation process.Under the guidance of Skopos Theory,the translator will use some examples and discuss about the translation strategies of proper nouns and long sentences to realize the readability of translation text,which is intended to provide some experience for future translation practice.It is argued that readability at lexical and syntactic level can be interpreted respectively as being accurate and widely acceptable and being close to the common expression of target language,of which the former acquires the translator to check word frequency through information searching while the latter acquires the translator to actively employ translation methods based on a good understanding of the sentence structure and the differences between English and Chinese.The retrieval techniques and translation methods argued for can also apply for other types of texts,and thus can promote the improvement of translation qualities.