A Report On E-C Translation Of Climate Change And Agriculture In Zimbabwe:sustainability In Minority Farming Communities(Chapters 4-5)

The material for this translation practice report is excerpted from the fourth and fifth chapters of Mark Matsa’s Climate Change and Agriculture in Zimbabwe:Sustainability in Minority Farming Communities.The book was released on the Springer website in 2021,and there is no Chinese versions available at present.Climate Change and Agriculture in Zimbabwe: Sustainability in Minority Farming Communities is a typical informative text.Focusing on minority farming communities in the developing southwest of Zimbabwe,Mark Matsa studied sustainable development issues caused by climate change faced by these communities.By analyzing the impact of climate change on agricultural production and farmers’ life in Zimbabwe,Mark Matsa sought to find possible solutions to the problems.Informative text aims at conveying information to readers and emphasizes accurate representation of the source text from the perspective of functional linguistics.Since the source text is a report,which belongs to the type of informative texts,the author has chosen Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory to appraise the translated text.Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory requires translators to adopt translation techniques in a flexible way according to the meaning and style of the source text and readers’ acceptance to achieve dynamic equivalence between the source language and the target language.As the source text is primarily a summary statement of facts,information,knowledge and opinions,the main purpose of translation is to convey the information of the source text as completely and accurately as possible.Unlike literary texts,which require the translator an analysis of writing style,this report focuses on the content of the translated text,elaborating and summarizing it in terms of words,sentences and text.The main purpose of translation is to convey the information of the source text as completely and accurately as possible.Therefore,the author mainly describes the translation,analyzing the translation practice report from the lexical level,syntactic level,and textual level.There are five chapters in this report.The first part is an introduction to the translation task.The second part describes the translation process from three stages,preparation,translation,and proofreading based on the language analysis of the source text.The third part is an overview of the Functional Equivalence Theory,and in this part,the key points of the Functional Equivalence Theory will be introduced,followed by the reason why the theory is chosen,and its application.The fourth part is the case analysis,which is the core of this report.In this chapter,the author analyzes typical cases selected at lexical,syntactic and textual levels respectively.By analyzing and discussing the problems encountered in practice,the translator summarizes and concludes nine translation techniques to solve the difficulties during the translation: four-character expression,amplification,annotation,corresponding translation,conversion,division,inversion,repetition and omission.The fifth chapter,the last part of this report,summarizes the gains the translator has obtained during this translation practice and explains the limitations of this report.