Report On Translation Of But What If We're Wrong (Excerpt)

The book But What If We're Wrong is a non-literature work written by Chunk Klosterman and published in 2016.Chunk Klosterman,a well-known American writer and cultural critic,calls in questions on a variety of “common senses” or “truths”,involving cultural elements such as TV,films,and sports.All these doubts challenge people's cognition of the accepted and internalized ideas.This paper is a report on the translation of the preface and the seventh chapter of this book.The translator took Dynamic Equivalence theory introduced by Eugene Nida and Skopos theory adopted by Han J.Vermeer as the main theoretical support,and employed a variety of translation methods including amplifying,cutting,splitting and conversing in addressing difficulties on the lexical(neologisms,terminologies and hypernyms),syntactic(long and complex sentences),cultural(western cultural phenomena)and punctuation(dashes and parentheses)levels.Hopefully,the work presented here can have some practical implications on future translation of similar texts.Moreover,the translation can help Chinese readers understand the western culture and provide some references for the domestic cultural criticism.