A Report On The Translation Of History Of The Roman Empire(Part 2:Chapters 3(Section 2)-4)

This is a report on the translation of Chapter 3(Section 2)and Chapter 4 of Part 2 of History of the Roman Empire,a book written by an Irish author,Thomas Keightley.These selected two chapters mainly record the history occurring from the reign of the emperor Commodus to the emperor Alexander and narrate some important historical events of the Roman Empire,which include the replacement of emperors,internal conspiracies and foreign wars.All of these,in the author’s detailed description,are presented to the readers in a real way.Before starting translation,the translator read a lot of parallel texts to deepen the understanding of the history of the Roman Empire,which can make the translator fully prepare for the translation.And in order to accurately and naturally transform the source language into the target language,the translator,under the guidance of the Skopos theory,adopts various translation techniques and methods to solve the difficulties and problems in the process of translation.And the translator also analyzes these techniques and methods from three levels: lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.At the lexical level,the translator mainly adopts the methods of diction,conversion and annotation.As to the second level,the analysis covers the flexible translation of attributive clauses and long sentences.Then,at the textual level,the focus is on how to adjust the cohesive devices in the source text to achieve the coherence of the target text.In short,this translation practice has greatly benefited the translator.Through it,the translator realizes that in order to translate well,flexible transformation of language expression is necessary.Thus the fetter of English words and sentence patterns can be gotten rid of.At the same time,the translator should learn to think while translating,constantly examine the translation and make timely amendments to some illogical parts of the translation.In a word,the translator still needs to study hard in consideration of certain deficiencies in various aspects.