An English-Chinese Translation Report On The Unreality Of Memory(Chapter One)

This English-Chinese translation report is excerpted from The Unreality of Memory(Chapter I)written by Elias Gabbert.The Unreality of Memory collects articles on disaster culture and people’s observation and discussion of world diseases.These articles are profound and predictable.Elisa Gabbert notes that five global trends—climate change,disruption of animal habitats,increased air travel,crowding and megacities,and overuse and misuse of antibiotics—all increase the risk of the pandemic.The selected text has enlightening and forward-looking significance.This report analyzes the linguistic features and text types of the source text,as well as the difficulties encountered in the translation process,and enumerates the corresponding solutions.Aiming at the analysis of translation difficulties,the translator sets about two aspects at lexical and syntactic level.At lexical level,the translator uses the footnote to further explain the proper nouns that are professional in the original text,in order to make target readers achieve a correct and comprehensive understanding.When it comes to polysemy words,the translator should consider the context of the translated text and choose the most suitable meaning.In addition to the factor of considering the context,Chinese expression habit should be taken into consideration to convey the meaning accurately.As for pronoun’s translation,the translator should be clear about the case of English pronouns and the object they refer to,and choose the correct form of Chinese pronouns for translation by the way of reduction.At syntactic level,this report analyzes attributive clauses and parentheses.Confronted with the difficulties of attributive clauses,the translator should grasp the logical connection and implicit relationship between the principal clauses and the attributive clauses in line with the specific context,and translate the attributive clauses into adverbial sentences.In addition,the translator can translate the attributive clauses into coordinate sentences when the antecedent has other modifiers or meeting complicated and long attributive clauses.With regard to parentheses in the source text,some parentheses play the role in offering more information or explanation and it is not convenient to be translated into one sentence,the translator should adopt the method of adding words to render the structure of the sentence more compact.Restructuring the sentence order is another method used by the translator to solve the difficulties of parentheses’ translation.Restructuring the sentence order requests that the translator should make an analysis for the logical relationship and semantic connection among different constituents of the sentence,and should readjust them in the way of inversion or combination to accord with Chinese principles for syntactic rhetoric.Through this translation practice,the translator has gained experience and realized that there are still some limitations.On the one hand,the translation skills and methods used by the translator will be better applied to the later translation practice;on the other hand,the translator should further improve bilingual ability and translation level to lay a solid foundation for the later translation practice.