A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of A Question Of Power:Electricity And The Wealth Of Nations (Excerpts)

Electricity is one of the most important energy forms and a symbol of modernization.Today,electricity is indispensable to people’s daily life and study;the development of various industries depends on electricity;and it is also crucial at the national level.As such,the first part from the book A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations was selected as the source text for this translation practice.In this part,the author explains why electricity has a transformative effect on humans,especially on women,shows how electricity changes urban conditions and the life of farmers,and introduces the progress of electrification in the United States.The guiding theory of this E-C translation practice is Katharina Reiss’ s text typology theory.According to this theory,for informative text,the translation should be truthful and the translated text should be equivalent to the source text in expression,but it is not necessary to pursue word for word correspondence in form.Therefore,at the vocabulary level,the translator used the contextualized translation of semi-technical terms and the standardized literal translation of technical terms to ensure accuracy;at the syntactic level,the translator reorganized and integrated long and difficult sentences and changed the voice to pursue fluency;and at the textual level,the translator used lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion to achieve consistency.The significance of this translation practice lies in the following three points: 1)demonstrating the huge difference in electricity consumption between different regions in the world to trigger the Chinese public to think about the future of electricity;2)serving as a reference for our country’s current power system reform;and 3)providing useful experience for the translation practice of similar texts.