A Report On The Translation Of Crude Britannia(Excerpts)

The source text of this translation practice report is selected from the twelfth chapter of the third part of the book Crude Britannia.It reveals the history and social consequences of the UK’s oil business,its shifting relationship with the government over the last half-century,and the current fragmentation of its ownership.Currently,there is not a tendency of translation study on petroleum historical text in China.Through the analysis of lexical features,syntactic features,and textual features of the source text,functional equivalence theory is the most suitable theory to guide the translation of this type of text.At the lexical level,many typical non-proprietary words appear in the source text,including words rich in historical text features such as time,event,place,and name.Besides,there are oil industry terms and oil trade terms.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,the translation of terms and non-proprietary words is analyzed and summarized.At the syntactic level,the source text embodies strong literary linguistic features,including maxims,poems,dialogues,and declarative sentences.Through the guidance of functional equivalence theory,the translation of these different sentence patterns is summarized,and the difficulties and key points in the English-Chinese translation of petroleum historical documents are pointed out.At the textual level,the source text includes time words and proverbs as the connection of paragraphs,which reflects the cultural characteristics of petroleum historical documents.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,the difficulty of translating English proverbs into Chinese is solved.Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,this translation practice studies and summarizes the translation process and translation behavior in the translation of petroleum historical texts.It is hoped to provide reference value and experience for future scholars.