A Practice Report Of Chinese Translation On Travels In Alaska(Chapter 15-19)

In the late 20 th century, ecological literature emerged as a new literature type in American literature field, which was universally recognized as the most exciting literature type due to its description of nature and exploration of the relationship between human and nature. Apparently, the disaster caused by modernization to the nature has become a world concerned problem nowadays. The threat of nuclear war, the poisoning of chronic irradiation, the terrible growth of population, global warming, the ozone depletion, the aggravation of acid rain and deforestation……all these phenomena have raised people’s universal concern about ecology. Along with the ecological crisis in recent years, ecological literature has seen its increasingly considerable value. Ecological literature is beneficial to the harmonious, stable and sustainable existence of ecology system as its ultimate goal is to concern about the integrated interests of nature. Since its first emergence in western countries, ecological literature has been developing rapidly in various countries of the world. In view of China’s underdevelopment of ecological literature and indifference of ecology, it is highly necessary to introduce readable ecological literature by means of translation. In addition to the limited themes of ecological literature in China, most literature works on ecology mainly reveal or comment on some ecological phenomena but fail to attract readers. As ecological crisis becomes more and more serious these years in China, ecological literature sees its vital importance in domestic literature fields as a matter of course.This thesis selects John Muir’s Travels to Alaska as the subject of translation, the most well-known and influential advocator of ecology and nature protection, on account that the book not only inspires American citizens’ environmental conservation awareness, makes great contribution to American ecology with its wonderful description and practice and has a certain referential value for the environmental protection in China, but also makes an incisive and vivid description of landscapes in Alaska. In order to present the work to Chinese readers authentically, it is necessary for translators to make an equivalent English-Chinese transformation on lexical, syntactic and textual levels. Besides, in view of the literary category of the work, translators should also present its literariness in the overtone of translating. Therefore, the author, in the guidance of the American translation theorist Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory, aims to achieve the equivalence between source text(SL) and target text(TT) on lexical, syntactic and textual level through analyzing various translating strategies, such as amplification, omission, combination and division translation, maintaining the integrity of readability and literariness. What’s more, the translation in this paper also targets at presenting the diversified creatures, unique landscapes and ancient Indian culture to Chinese readers so that they can enrich their ecological knowledge, feel the natural fantasy, understand Muir’s integrated ecological ideology and participate in the practice of ecological protection.