A Report On The E-C Translation Of A Crooked Line:From Cultural History To The History Of Society (Chapter Three)

This report is based on an English-Chinese translation task assigned by a university teacher to render the book of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society(Chapter Three).This book is published by the University of Michigan Press and now there is no Chinese version of this book.The author of the source text takes a personal take on the development of historical understanding from social history through the so-called “cultural turn”,and back to social history again.This report consists of four chapters.Chapter One introduces the background,requirements and significance of the translation project.Chapter Two elaborates the translation procedures including pre-translation preparation,translation and post-translation.Chapter Three is the case study which illustrates translation methods and strategies applied in translation practice.Chapter Four is the last part of this report,summarizing the translation methods and strategies as well as the experience learnt in rendering.Furthermore,the limitations of this project is discussed in this chapter.The report analyzes the type and features of the source text and puts forward solutions to the difficulties met in the translation process.It is hoped that more and more people acquaint themselves with the development of German social history and leverage it to promote the advance of domestic social history.Similarly,this translation project provides an opportunity to the author to accumulate translation experience on historical texts.The source text is excerpted from an academic book concerning social history featured by formal and rigorous words.Besides,long and complicated sentences chartered by high-density nominalization and close-knit structures reflect the internal logic relationships behind lines and detailed arrangements of ideas.To the end of achieving the faithfulness and smoothness of translation,the report proposes several translation methods,for instance,annotation,addition and semantic translation are three effective methods in rendering special nouns;sequential translation,division and restructuration are useful in the translation of long and complicated sentences.In general,those translation methods above help to perform the translation task under the requirements of grasping the gist and maintaining the style of source text to a large extent.