Translating Style:Toward Clarity And Grace Into Chinese

This introspective report is based on the English-Chinese translation of a 10000-word excerpt from Style:Toward Clarity and Grace (1990), commissioned by the Association of Scientific and Technical Translators of Jiangsu Province. The purpose of this report is to discuss the problems and difficulties encountered during the translation process and the solutions that may help produce an adequate and readable target text.This report is divided into five sections. It first describes the translation project, focusing on information such as the client who commissioned the translation project, the intended readers of the target text, requirements for the target text, and quality control measures adopted. It then goes on to discuss Nida's functional equivalence in translation, which advocates the equivalence between the function of the source text in the source culture and the function of the target text in the target culture. The third section discusses the textual features of the source text, and predicts translation problems that may arise from the source text's use of linguistic terms and compound and complex sentences. The fourth section analyzes some translation examples taken from the translation project in question and the present author's translation decisions from the perspective of functional equivalence, with an emphasis on translation methods (e.g. omission, amplification, restructuring, conversion) that have been adopted to solve word-level and sentence-level translation problems. Finally, this report concludes with a brief summary of what has been learnt during completion of the translation project. It also points out that the translation problems and solutions discussed in this report are project-specific and situation-dependent.