A Report On The Translation Of The First Two Chapters Of The Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide

Economic column belongs to news review, an important form of journalese. It is the review on some problems, phenomenon and trend of development in the economic field.Such articles are relatively professional with economic terms and refined words. Passive sentences are often used to describe the economic phenomenon in an objective way. Long and complex sentences as well as simple sentences with many modifiers are also frequently used to add to the coherence and narrative logic. Besides, the unique writing style and language features of the columnist are contained in the columns.Due to the differences of two languages that Chinese emphasizes parataxis while English emphasizes hypotaxis, there exists much difference in word order, focus of sentence, sentence pattern and ways of expression. Therefore, translators are required to make adjustment of the original sentences on the basis of completely understanding the original meaning in the process of translation.Based on the translation of the economic book the Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide written by Robert Frank, the author of this paper makes a translation report on the first two chapters of the book. This book is a collection of selected columns, most of which originally appeared in the New York Times. Complex sentences and simple sentences with many modifiers is the main translation difficulty when translating such economic columns. In this paper, the author mainly discusses how to deal with the translation of such complex long sentences.In the report, the author first makes analysis of the function of the translated version and the characteristics of the original text. In the process of translation, the author under the guidance of Nida’s Functional Equivalence theory adopts four translation methods,namely conversion, division, reversion and recasting to make adjustment to the original sentences, aiming to better convey information to the target readers, acquire their acknowledgment. Through the author’s own translation practice, she concludes that the economic columns belong to informative text, the main purpose of which is to convey information. Therefore, in the translation process, the translator should take the content,language and style into account and then adopt appropriate translation methods to restructure the original sentence so that the target readers can receive a similar response.