A Critical Commentary On The E-C Translation Of Chapter 2 Of Brand New Nation:Capitalist Dreams And Nationalist Designs In Twenty-First-Century India

The present translation report consists of two parts: an E-C translation of an excerpt from Brand New Nation by Ravinder Kaur,and a Critical Commentary that sums up the problems the translator has come across in translating the text and the strategies used to resolve these problems.Brand New Nation is one of the books in the series “South Asia in Motion”published by Stanford University Press.Written by Ravinder Kaur from the University of Copenhagen,who is engaged in modern South Asian studies,the book is divided into seven chapters,which focuses on the economic status of India as a nation-state in the21 st century from the perspective of capitalism and nationalism,covering economics,sociology,political science,anthropology and other fields.The text belongs with what Katharina Reiss calls an informative text.So in its translation,the translator has adopted strategies that suit this type of text both from a linguistic and a technical perspective.According to Reiss,texts for translation can be divided into informative,expressive,and operative types.Brand New Nation falls into the “informative” category because its content is largely economic.In translating such texts,the main purpose is to accurately convey the content of the original text.This requires that the translator should use language in a way that is both precise and plain,for the purpose of making its reading easier to the target language readers,or in other words,making the translation readable and fluent in Chinese.The translation strategies and techniques adopted in the translation are analyzed in this report from two levels: the lexical level and the syntactic level.At the lexical level,the literal translation method is mainly adopted for the terminologies,abbreviations and acronyms and proper nouns in the original text.At the same time,annotations are added to enable the readers to better understand the text.In addition,due to differences in expressions between Chinese and English,translation strategies such as conversion of part of speech,amplification and omission are applied in the Chinese translation for common usage in English.At the syntactic level,since the original text contains a large number of long sentences,the translator adopts the strategies of following the original syntactic order,turning phrases into clauses and reinventing sentence structures according to the characteristics of different sentence patterns.Because economic texts are highly specialized,the translator referred to Chinese economic texts when translating it,in order to make the translation read more professional.It is hoped that this report will of value to those working as translators of similar texts in the future.