A Report On The Translation Of The Agile Leader—How To Create An Agile Business In The Digital Age(Chapter Eight And Nine)

This is a translation report,based on the book The Agile Leader—How to Create An Agile Business in the Digital Age.The translator finishes the chapter 8 and 9 of the book,which mainly introduces how organizations achieve improvement through learning and innovation and specific steps to create an agile enterprise.As a senior organization manager,the author of the book distills years of leadership and agile research into an actionable 8 step plan.The book discusses how to tackle challenges in the changing digital age,how to create and manage an organization in a more agile way,and how to be a successful leader.At the same time,the author also directly speaks to “you”—the target reader of the book,namely,the leader or the manager,providing “you” with valuable suggestions.According to Newmark’s theory,the book is characterized as informative-function text and vocative-function text.As Newmark’s communicative translation theory illustrates,informative-function text and vocative-function text shall be translated with communicative translation method,with conveying information and achieving communicative effect as the main target.Translators should prioritize target readers’ ability to accept source text and focus on the sense instead of the original linguistic forms and accurately convey the true meaning of the source text to achieve effective communication.Also,the translation should be more in line with the expression habits of the target language so as to better convey the methods of agile management to domestic organization leaders.To achieve that aim,the translator needs to take readers’ reading response into consideration and cope with various English expressions in a flexible way.Guided by communicative translation theory,such strategies as part of speech conversion,annotation,amplification,idiomatic translation can be applied to mitigate translationese and improve the quality of the translated text at lexical and phrasal level.When translating long compound sentences,the translator can turn to structural adjustment,division and omission to achieve the effective communication between the translated text and the target readers;in the translation of long paragraphs,methods like adding topic sentences and rearranging textual structures can make the translation explicit and concise,which better caters to the expression habits of the Chinese readers.The translator also pays special attention to the translation of rhetoric,trying to keep a balance between maintaining the rhetorical effect and achieving the readability of the translation.Although the author has solved many problems with the methods mentioned above,there’s still plenty of scope for improvement.For example,some background information fails to be found due to limited access and lack of access.The author still needs to keep on enhancing translation skills by expanding knowledge reserve and improving information gathering ability to perform better in her future practice.The author hopes this practice report could provide enlightenment to future translation research.