An English-Chinese Translation Report On Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide To Excellent Writing And Speaking (Chapters 5-8)

This is a report on English-Chinese translation.The source text selected is Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking,which is written by the lexicographer,linguist,radio presenter and speaker Grant Barrett.Based on his own accumulation and practical experience over these years,the author Grant Barrett provides simple and practical knowledge about grammar for English learners in the book and analyzes the internal logic behind the English grammar.The author also puts a great deal of real-life examples to help the readers fully understand the grammar points.This grammar book aims to solve the difficulties of English grammar encountered by English users in their daily life and work.As a usage guide,it hopes to provide the English users with practical help.The translation report is written based on the translation of Chapter five to Chapter eight,and it aims to bring a kind of new thinking on grammar instead of rigid rules to the English learners,advocating learning and applying in practice.The source text is an English grammar book,in which a large number of grammatical terms inevitably appear.Additionally,attributive clauses and parentheses are often used to convey information while pro-forms are often used to avoid repetition.All these are the prominent language features of the source text,but to some extent,they do make the source text hard to naturally catch on to.Therefore,this report mainly elucidates the translation difficulties from the above four aspects.After further analysis,appropriate translation methods were chosen,including:(1)a large number of grammatical terms appear in the source text,and the method of selection of word meanings was adopted;(2)for some pro-forms,the translator used the method of explanation to make the language more specific;(3)Considering the relation of the antecedents to the attributive clauses as well as the logic of the target text,the translator finally chose the methods of division and combination to translate the attributive clauses;(4)Based on the different types of parentheses,the methods of putting parentheses in round brackets and putting parentheses in sentence-initial position were adopted to make the target language more flexible and accurate.Finally,a summary of the whole translation practice is presented,which includes the experience gained in the translation process,for example,a more specific classification of grammatical terms is made in terms of the internal structures within the grammar and it is hoped that such experience can be conducive to the translation of grammar books in the future.At the same time,due to the limited ability of the translator,there are some deficiencies in this translation practice,such as unnatural Chinese expressions,imprecise understanding and so on.What’s more,the report puts forward some suggestions for further research in such field,for example,grammarians should try to ensure the consistency of the translation of grammatical terms.