A Report On The Translation Of Language And Meaning (Excerpts)

Language and Meaning is a linguistic book written by Betty J.Birner,professor from Northern Illinois University.In this book,Prof.Birner presents a bunch of linguistic phenomena and illustrates these phenomena with the theories of philosophy,semantics and pragmatics by using objective and humorous tone,directing the readers to a new understanding of meaning and methods to figure out the implied meaning behind sentences.For the time being,no translating edition of the book has been published in China.This translation report consists of two parts: translation practice and translation report.The translator translates mainly chapter one and chapter two from this book,about 20,000 words in total.The source text is an expressive text as well as an informative text,so the translator uses theories of semantic translation and communicative translation from Peter Newmark to guide her translation.Under the guidance of these theories,the translation edition retains the rhetoric and sentence structure and uses translation methods such as annotation,amplification,concretization,substitution,and omission.In this way,the salient features of the source text can represent in the target text;besides,comprehension obstacles for target readers will be reduced.The translation report will be an analysis and summary of the difficulties and experience in the translation practice on the basis of the features and style of the source text.As a rigorous but no lack of interest academic work,the Chinese version of this book can be a primer for linguistic beginners.Chinese readers can enjoy fun and inspiration during their easy reading.However,due to the lack of linguistic background and rigorous logic thinking,there is still room for improvement in terms of the accuracy of the target text.The translator will read more linguistic works and enrich background knowledge to overcome the translation difficulties in academic works,to improve the quality of this report.