A Report On The Translation Of A Diary: China’s Battle Against The COVID-19(Excerpts)

In this translation practice,the translator chooses the book A Diary: China’s Battle Against The COVID-19 as the translation material.It is a collection of reports written by Guangming Daily which records the huge efforts and sacrifice of Chinese people in fighting COVID-19.Report 3,Report 8 and Report 10 are selected as the source text.The source text belongs to soft news,in which there are a large quantity of direct speeches and colloquial words.The expression of ideas and emotions is specially emphasized in this kind of news.Besides,Chinese culture-specific expressions and medical terms are also frequently seen in the text.In view of these features,the translator completes the practice under the guidance of the relevance theory.The relevance theory,put forward by Sperber &Wilson(1986),views communication as an ostensive-inferential process.It proposes that the ultimate goal of communication is optimal relevance,the realization of which needs both the enhancement of contextual effects and the reduction of processing efforts.Guided by the relevance theory,four main translation methods including addition,free translation,omission and explicitation are adopted in this translation practice to strengthen the contextual effects and reduce the readers’ processing efforts so that the optimal relevance can be achieved.Based on the practice,the translator also summarizes and classifies the circumstances under which these translation methods are suitable for use so as to provide some references for the translation of texts of the same type.