A Translation Report On English Politeness And Class(Chapters 3-4)

The material of this English-Chinese translation practice report is chapter 3 and chapter 4 of English Politeness and Class written by Sara Mills,a Research Professor in Sheffield Hallam University.It has been confirmed that no translation of the book has appeared in China.In the book,professor Sara Mills,taking British-English politeness and middle class in Britain as the research objects,focused on the interrelationship between class and politeness,analyzed the intersectional relations between(im)politeness,language,culture,class and other factors from the view of interdisciplinary subjects like pragmatics,sociology,anthropology etc.,and reinterpreted the(im)politeness of different classes in interpersonal communication.All of these not only broadened the scope of the current interpersonal(im)politeness research,but also offered some new ideas and enlightenment for the study of interpersonal pragmatics.English Politeness and Class belongs to pragmatics academic text with the following translation difficulties: first,in terms of lexicality,the difficulties lie in the understanding of terminologies,metaphors and metonymies,since they contain technical knowledge in the related fields;second,at the syntax level,the book contains a host of attributive clauses hard to comprehend and translate;third,with respect to the stylistic level,how to reproduce the original logic and style in the target language remains a difficulty.Those difficulties are the very problems the author need to solve in her translation.Under the guidance of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory,the author translated the third and four chapters of the book and wrote this report.From the aspects of technical terminology,metaphor,metonymy,attributive clause,logic and wording,the author,guided by functional equivalence,analyzed how to achieve lexical,syntactic and stylistic equivalence with the help of translation methods such as employing suitable translation plus the source term,explaining metaphoricalmeaning,using Chinese four-character structure,and readjusting the word order.Through this translation practice,the author realizes that a good translation is the result of a thorough understanding of the original text,the combination of theory and practice,and multiple revisions.The author hopes the translation can enhance target readers' understanding of the British politeness and class,and provide some useful experience for the future translation of the similar text.