An English-Chinese Translation Report Of Swiss Watching (Excerpts)

This is an English-Chinese translation report on the book Swiss Watching – Inside the Land of Milk and Money.The second part of this book is selected as the source text to translate,and the translation problems encountered here has been categorized and analyzed.It is an introductory book of Switzerland from the perspective of a journalist,a foreigner,but also a Swiss resident.It seems to be the travel essays,characterized by the diversity of cultural information and individuality of expression,which is fully revealed in both content and style.The intention of translating this book is to provide a book with a strong sense of reality and powerful image for English learners,who are enthusiastic about European history and culture greatly,and meanwhile offer them the opportunity to explore a magical country in Europe from a brand-new perspective.Thereby the understanding of Chinese and Western cultures as well as cross-cultural communication will be enhanced and promoted.In view of the fact that there is no published Chinese version of this book,the translator chooses it as the source text to translate,and because of the originality of the content in the text,the translator has encountered several problems in translation process.In this translation practice,the translator experiences the whole process of translation.In order to ensure the quality of the translation,in the pre-preparation stage of the translation process,the translator firstly searches the network for the key information closely related to the subject,and reads a lot of relevant information;secondly,the textual characteristics of the text has been analyzed;and then the translation has been revised repeatedly in the later period.Through this translation practice,reference for similar text translation and learners is expected to provide.This report consists of five parts,namely introduction,translation process,translation problems,approaches applied in the translation process to solve these translation problems,and conclusion.From the perspective of translation,the difficulties encountered in translation process have been summarized,and the translator divides them into lexical,syntactical and discourse level,including culture-loaded words,figurative words,complex sentence,non-subject-predict sentence,as well as coherence in discourse.Through the analysis of specific cases,the translator proposes corresponding translation approaches and techniques to solve these problems,such as amplification and annotation as well as free translation and domestication to words,splitting and adjustment and conversion to sentences,as well as restructuring and rearrangement adopted to achieve the coherence of the translation.This translation practice indicates that,first of all,the translator's professional competence needs to be continuously improved,including deep comprehension of the source text and the refinement and cultivation of bilingual ability and bilingual culture literacy.Secondly,the translator should expand the horizon and enrich the knowledge,as well as persist in accumulating background knowledge of different cultures;in addition,the translator still essentially needs to make constant exploration and to do summary of problem-solving methods in practice,so as to grasp more translation strategies and to achieve self-improvement in future translation.