A Report On The Translation Of PROTOCOL:The Power Of Diplomacy And How To Make It Work For You (Chapter 10)

With the increasingly frequent international exchanges,there are more people who came to notice the role of diplomatic protocol in diplomatic activities.Knowing more about diplomatic protocol norms of different countries can effectively reduce misunderstandings caused by cultural differences in diplomatic activities and build a perfect diplomatic image.Therefore,it is quite necessary to introduce and translate books which are related to diplomatic protocol.The source text used in this translation practice is abstracted from Chapter 10 of Capricia Penavic Marshall’s PROTOCOL:The Power of Diplomacy and How to Make it Work for You,"Secrets of a Gift Whispherer," in which the author details the story of choosing a diplomatic gift for President Obama when she worked for the Protocol Department,and takes it as an example for those who want to give gifts at work and in their life.Considering the narrative and exposition of the text,Nida’s functional equivalence translation theory is adopted as the guiding theory of the translation practice of this text,which aims to achieve equivalence with the original text in terms of content.This practice report consists of four parts.The first part introduces the source of the selected materials,the author’s background,the introduction of the works and the significance of the topic.The second part depicts the preparatory work before translation,including reading analysis,translation methods and the selection of auxiliary tools.The difficulties in the initial translation and the modification,polishing and finalization of the translation are also introduced in this part.The third part is the analysis of translation cases,which is also the core of this report.The author analyzes the key points and difficulties in translation from the aspects of vocabulary,syntax,discourse and punctuation.Sentence level involves long difficult sentences,passive sentences and attributive clauses.At the level of discourse,cohesion and coherence are analyzed to make the discourse logical and readable.The last part in this chapter mainly analyzes the translation treatment of special punctuation marks in this chapter.The fourth part of report summarizes the author’s thoughts and reflections of the translation practice.