A Report On Translation Of A Biography Of The English Language (the First Chapter)

The compilation and publication of specialized materials for English major have been prosperous in recent years, including translation of foreign teaching materials. The new trend of language teaching has enriched the selection of teaching materials for colleges and universities. This translation report is based on the translation of A Biography of the English Language (the Third Edition), published by the famous American Cengage Learning Company. There are nine chapters in this book, the first chapter of which was the task of this report, covering about ten thousand and seven hundred words.In the report, the translator first analyzes the language features and the style in order to ascertain the guiding ideology and basic principles for translation task. Then the translator illustrates the preparations done before task, including referring to relevant books, the linguistic terms and the difficult points with consulting similar textbooks. In the process of this translation task, the translator use three kinds of translation techniques and try to equivalent the influence on Chinese readers as much as its influence on English native readers.With the purpose of conveying information, the translator has paid much attention to the accuracy and professionality of the Chinese version. In order to make the target readers clearly understand the different language changes in different times and lay the foundation for future English-learning, the translator has worked out the conclusions as below: Firstly, we can not simply treat translation as finding the corresponding words one-by-one in two different languages. The translator should consider the whole text and its style, that is to say, using the broader view to deal with the languages; Secondly, doing translation is an activity with special intentions. How to do translation and what we do in translating, the translators need to have clear purposes, because the specific Chinese version should not only present meaning of its English version, but also pay due attention to Chinese readers. This piece of work is a representative of informative text in English-Chinese translation. The translator expects to help the English learners with this Chinese version and give some useful suggestions for other translation tasks.