A Translation Report Of Cultureshock! Chicago(Excerpts)

Cultureshock! Chicago：A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette is one of threeguide books of American writer Orin Hargraves. The author’s aim of writing thesebooks is to share his experience of dealing with culture shock with readers who are tocope with these feelings and help them adapt to the new life of an unfamiliar city in abetter and faster way. Today，with the development of international tourism, the demandof this kind of books tends to increase. The first two chapters of this book are chosen astranslation practice, a total of more than ten thousand words. These two chapters mainlyintroduce people’s first impression of Chicago and an overview of Chicago includingpolitics, history, economy, and climate, etc.A travel guide mainly introduces the general situation of the tourist city, so thereare a lot of relevant cultural contents in this book. Thus, in translating this kind of books,culture terms are the key points, while sentence pattern and idiomatic expressions aredifficult points. Language style should also be carefully grasped. There are a largenumber of culture terms in those parts describing the politics and history of Chicago inthis book. When translating these culture terms, the writer uses literal translationmethod as much as possible, and explains them in a way of making notes. Then thereaders cannot only understand easily, but also know about different cultures. For thetypical English idiomatic expression, the writer transforms them flexibly according tothe idiomatic expression of the target language in order to make the language moreauthentic and easier to be understood. In addition, as a travel guide, the language of itshould be succinct and a lot of colloquialism is expertly used. Therefore, when doingtranslating, the writer takes efforts to have the tone the translation to be breezy andsomewhat humorous so as to attract readers.The report describes the whole process of translation practice, analyzes andsummarizes the typical cases of the translation according to the method of classification.The writer hopes that this translation practice can have readers comprehensively know about Chicago, and the lessons of this translation practice can also provide a referenceto the translation of the same types of books.