A Report On The Translation Of Economic Reviews In Financial Times

As a communicative activity, translation is not only the conversion of information across two languages but also the communication between two cultures. The Chinese investors are required to know about the trends of world economy before making decisions. They get the information by reading economic reviews written by the famous economists in the world. The economic news and economic reviews published in Financial Times meet Chinese investors’ need. According to the text type theory, economic reviews are of informative text. Therefore, the translation of the economic reviews should be loyal to the source text and to realize the dynamic equivalence. Because of the differences between Chinese culture and western culture, the translation loss is unavoidable, which is classified into four aspects: cultural loss, grammatical loss, pragmatic loss and aesthetic loss.This report is based on the translation of economic reviews in Financial Times. In the process of translation, the cultural loss, caused by cultural non-equivalence, is a barrier for Chinese readers to understand the purpose of the original text. And it was compensated by amplification in this translation practice. Grammatical loss is caused by the use of passive sentences and the category of number in the source text, which are fewer and absent in Chinese respectively. As a result, the author uses shift of perspective to make sure the translation readable for Chinese readers and adds Chinese words which signal the plural number. Pragmatic loss means that some specific information is easy for the native readers to understand but confuses non-native readers. The author makes up for the pragmatic loss by paraphrasing the sentences and amplification. The figure of speech is hard to be reproduced in form and in meaning. In the selected articles, alliteration is the most common type of figures of speech. For such kind of aesthetic loss, the author uses end rhyme and paraphrase in the target text.All in all, it is necessary for the translators to compensate for the cultural loss, grammatical loss, pragmatic loss and aesthetic loss caused by the differences between two cultures consciously.