An E-C Translation Report Of Learning To Interpret:Working From English To American Sign Language(Excerpts)under Skopos Theory

With more consideration given to the deaf community,study on sign language interpreting is also on the rise.Learning to Interpret: Working from English to American Sign Language published by RIT Press in 2018 is a workbook for interpreters.It combines theory with practice through the elaboration of translation methods and specific examples,and is of greatly instructive significance to the interpreting from English to ASL.Guided by Vermeer’s Skopos theory,translation strategies and techniques feasible to the E-C translation of sign language interpreting are presented from lexical,syntactic and textual level.Based on an in-depth analysis,the source text is observed to be objective and concise in speech style and is characterized by the extensive use of technical terms,nominalization,passive voice,non-subject sentences and textual cohesion devices.The main difficulty of the translation practice lies in handling the above linguistic phenomena.Under the guidance of Skopos rule,the translator adopts shift and division to deal with nominalization and long sentences,for accurately conveying the original information to readers.Under the guidance of coherence rule,the translator applies annotation to give a further explanation to unfamiliar terms,and uses addition and omission to convert textual cohesive devices,aiming to enhance the readability of the target text.Under the guidance of fidelity rule,the translator mainly employs calque,amplification and repetition,for the purpose of achieving the faithfulness of the target text to the source text either in semanteme or in form.In this report,the translator illustrates how to apply translation methods or techniques to solve the problems encountered in the translation process through specific case analysis,striving to provide reference for Chinese translation of workbook on sign language interpreting.