A Translation Report On Edison And The Raise Of Innovation(Excerpts)

The source text of this translation practice report is based on the biography of the greatest inventor Thomas Edison——Edison and the Raise of Innovation——written by Leonard DeGraaf,the Thomas Edison National Historical Park archivist.The book was published in 2013 and for memory of the 80 th anniversary(the year of 2011)of the death of Thomas Edison(February 11,1847 – October 18,1931).Meanwhile,this year(the year 2017)is also the 170 th anniversary of his birth.Besides,now there is no Chinese version of Edison and the Raise of Innovation.Hence,the translation works about Thomas Edison becomes very necessary and significant.Here,the translator chooses four chapters,which are Thomas Edison’s education;invent factory(the Menlo Park lab),tinfoil phonograph and Electric Lighting System as the translation material.The translation process is carried out in following five steps:(1)intensive reading and understanding of the source text,(2)searching for the related parallel information,(3)preliminary translation,(4)proofreading,and(5)finalization of the translation.This translation practice report generally includes five parts:(1)the introduction,(2)description of translation process,(3)translation theory guidance,(4)case analysis of translation,and(5)a summary about improving direction and experience from the translation practice.The main body of the report is about how to use the textual reconstruction in E-C translation by case analysis through the comparison of the First Translation and the Final Translation under the guidance of the Context Theory and Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion & Coherence Theory.Considering the different structures of source text and target text;meanwhile,to make the translation more cohesive & coherent and closer to the expressing habit of the target language,the translator adopts the textual reconstruction by(1)logical order,(2)chronological order and(3)spatial order in this E-C translation.Due to the limited ability of the translator,the limitation of the report is that it only analyzes the textual reconstruction in a finite number of situations;other possible situations need to be future explored.