A Report On The Translation Of Our Life In China (Excerpt)

The MTI graduation report mainly discusses a translation project based on the travelling autobiography, namely, Our Life in China (1869) written by Helen S. C. Nevius whose husband was a famous American missionary.This book is divided into twenty chapters. Arranged chronologically, The book narrates the life of the Nevius family in China faithfully. The report is concerned the translation of Chapter 1---"Voyage and Arrival in China", Chapter 9 ---"Visit to Japan "and chapter 10--- "Visit to Japan (continued)" This report is divided into five chapters, Chapter One offers a brief introduction to the original work and introduces the background, objectives, significance of the report. Chapter Two analyzes the language features of the book and introduces the principle guiding that the report employs. Chapter Three discusses the understanding, wording and proofreading of the source text. Chapter four, which is the core section of the report, can be divided into two parts, part one employs relevance theory as the guiding principle to solve difficulties during the translation process, part two introduces several ways to search, analyze and discriminate available parallel text which might be helpful in restoring historical facts. In Chapter Five, gains and experience as well as unsolved problems and insufficiencies are carefully discussed.This report employs relevance theory as its guiding principle and points out its significant value for the translation of documentary literature.