E-C Translation Of The Selected Chapters (Chapters 3-5) From The Dawn Of European Civilization And A Critical Commentary

This translation project is composed of two parts.The first part is a critical commentary,which reviews the whole translation process and elaborates on the translation approaches applied in this process.The commentary consists of four sections: an introduction,the theoretical guidance,the strategies,and a conclusion.The second part comprises the selected text and its corresponding translation.The source text is excerpted from a historical book entitled The Dawn of European Civilization,the author of which is Griffith Hartwell Jones,who was a Welsh academic and an Anglican clergyman.In his book,Griffith Hartwell Jones conducted thorough research on the formation and improvement of Greek and Roman civilizations to illustrate the early development of the European civilization.The selected parts contain three chapters(Chapter 3 to Chapter 5)with Chapters 3 and 4discussing the impact of migration and environment on the development of the Greeks and Romans and Chapter 5 talking about the blending and colliding process that happened between foreign civilizations and the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.According to the text type theory put forward by Katharina Reiss,the source text is examined to be a historical one with informative and expressive functions,the characteristics of which are logical progression,unpretentious language,and a stern focus on conveying historical information and facts.This translation project,accordingly,resorts to the Skopos theory to convey the original information clearly and accurately;translation strategies such as amplification,transliteration,omission,division,and negation are employed to achieve the faithfulness and smoothness of the translation and to deal with problems arising anywhere in the translation process.This translation project is expected to provide interested Chinese readers with a more detailed encyclopedic background and more abundant research stock for the studies of the origin and development of the European civilization.In the whole process of getting this project accomplished,the translator’s bilingual proficiency is brought into full play and the translator’s ability to generalize and summarize what has been acquired is also brought into full light.