A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Chinese In America(Excerpt)

China has been surging forward with great momentum since it adopted the reform and opening up policy more than 40 years ago.With domestic poverty completely eliminated,China has fully integrated itself into the world economic system and continued to improve its international status.The United States,by comparison,get lost in the muck of the Covid-19 epidemic,with far more cases of infection and deaths than any other country.Many American elites believe that the only way to make America great again is to contain China’s development and completely change the “world trade chain,which is essentially dominated by China”.The competition between China and the United States is getting daily intensified in trade,technology,and even military.And the treacherous Sino-US relations and the recession caused by the epidemic have led to the formation of a strong anti-Chinese sentiment in American society.In the past two years,there have been numerous hate crimes against Asians,especially Chinese.Nowadays,the level of anti-Chinese hatred in American society is no less than that of the mid-nineteenth century,when the concept of the “yellow peril” was prevalent.On this basis,I chose Chapter 9 The Chinese Exclusion Act from the book The Chinese in America as the source text for this translation practice report,hoping that domestic readers can better understand this period of history from which we can draw more lessons.It is Toury’s translation norms that offered me a favorable perspective in translating the source text.Toury considers translation as a social and cultural activity restricted by norms,and proceeds to put forth three kinds of translation norms: initial norms,preliminary norms and operational norms.Based on the normative requirements,I chose Chapter 9 The Chinese Exclusion Act in a bid to enable more people to learn about the history of Chinese immigrants in the United States and their sufferings,which reflected the requirements of preliminary norms.Affected by initial norms,the translator tried to strike a balance between two extreme ends of “adequacy” and “acceptability”;on a basis of operational norms,the translator utilized various translation techniques,including annotation,addition,omission,the change of word order and division,in order to achieve the translation purpose.Beyond that,this report explores the characteristics of documentary literature and reflects on the application and significance of Toury’s norms theory in documentary literature.It is found that Toury’s norms theory is very advantageous to the translation practice of this text type.Documentary literature is featured by both literature and authenticity.Toury’s translation theory helps translators establish the corresponding translation strategies and methods in a macro sense,which helps translators in translating this kind of text type.