A Report On The Translation Of Elephants And Kings—An Environmental History(Exerpts)

The translation of social sciences texts are of great importance in various translation texts.Social sciences texts are characteristic of their wide range of knowledge and various contents,covering politics,military,culture,society,environment and so on,They play a prominent part in all kinds of books for their abundant knowledge.Therefore,translating such texts is beneficial to society and human developing.This report is designed to analyze the translation of a social sciences text,Elephants and Kings:An Environmental History written by Thomas R.Trautmann.The task is a translation report on English-Chinese translation of the fifth chapter of the book.This report aims to discuss how translation methods applied to translation can make the translation smooth and follow translation principles.Translation methods should be utilized flexibly to satisfy target language readers,to show its beauty and to avoid translationese.For this report,the linguistic orientation is first defined.In light of language features of source text,the report focuses on difficulties and translation methods.Difficulties cover culture-loaded vocabularies and long complex sentences.The translation methods are analyzed from two levels:lexical level and syntactical level.At lexical level,transliteration and zero translation,semantic explication,amplification,and conversion are applied to translation.At syntactical level,linear translation,hysteron-proteron,reinventing sentences structure and omission are used.The methods applied to the present translation are intended to produce smooth and fluent Chinese without too apparent translationese judging by translation principles such as faithfulness,expressiveness and elegance,so as to be loyal to the source text and make the translation language readable and intelligible.It turned out that the linguistic orientation of the source text should be paid more attention to when they are translated since they direct the translation.Translation work should focus on improving capabilities of deep understanding and intensive analysis of the source text.When the translation methods are applied to translation,translators are obligated to balance the loyalty to source texts and target readers.