A Translation Report Of Teacher (Excerpts)

The book Teacher records New Zealand author and educator, SylviaAshton-Warner’s real English teaching experiences and methods in Maori school, whenteaching about five-year-old Maori Children. Today，this book are strikingly theguidance of the teaching of socially disadvantaged and non-English-speaking students.It is translated into more than seventeen different languages versions, however, there isno Chinese version. This book is divided into two parts: Creative Teaching and Life in aMaori School. The writer of the report chooses the first six chapters of first part (morethan13000words) as translating project to have translation exercise. This part mainlyintroduces indoor’s key vocabulary, spelling, organic reading and writing as well asoutdoor’s activities and numbering.There exist abundant sentence pattern in the book Teacher, especially emphaticsentence, inverted sentence and elliptical sentence. Besides, the author uses the plentyof rhetoric means such as parallelism and rhetorical question. Therefore, the translationof the language style is not only the key points, but also the difficult points in translatingthis book. In the translation process, the writer of the report makes an attempt to adoptliteral translation in order to keep the original sentence pattern, aiming for accuratelyexpressing the style of the original text. Only if disobeying Chinese basic language rules,the writer adopts free translation.Through this translation practice, the writer of this report makes followingconclusions: First, English always makes ellipsis of the same verb, while Chinesealways repeats the word or pay attention to the collocation of verb and noun. Thusaddition or repetition should be concerned in translation. Second, English prefersimpersonal subject, such as formal subject “it” and “there be” structure, while Chineseis used to personal subject, so conversion of impersonal subject should be taken place.Third, English is tends to be static language, always using nouns, adjectives and prepositions, on the contrary, Chinese is more dynamic by using verbs even a series ofverbs, thus conversion of word classes should be paid attention in translation.