A Report On The Translation Of Conditions Of The American Colored Population,and Of The Colony At Liberia(excerpts)

Historical materials are reflections of a period or several periods of history from multiple aspects with diverse perspectives,rich contents,and strict styles.Reading historical materials can enhance people's understanding of history.Therefore,translation of historical materials is rather important.With this thought in mind,the author has selected to translate Conditions of the American Colored Population,and of the Colony at Liberia released by the American Colonization Society.It has not been translated into Chinese by others yet.The style of the chosen material features a mixture of legal and narrative elements,as strictness and literariness can always be found in the whole text.Meanwhile,some second-hand materials including dictations and letters can also be seen,which add subjectivity and sensibility to the text.In addition to the translation proper,in the light of the functional equivalence theory by Eugene Nida,an attempt has also been made to analyze the language characteristics of and relevant strategies for handling such historical materials.Respective discussions on these issues are conducted at the lexical and the syntactic levels,and in terms of logical cohesion.Translation at the lexical level is approached with discussions on the rendition of legal terms,proper names(including names of people,places,organizations,etc.),culture-specific words as well as words with special meanings.Nominalization,a frequent phenomenon in the original text,is also dealt with in this section of the report.Translation at the syntactic level is discussed with emphasis being given to passive structures and long sentences,which are often characteristic and reflexive of the legal aspects of the original text.In terms of cohesion and coherence,emphasis is put on how to deal with the explicit logical cohesion as well as the implicit logical cohesion to make translation more accurate,smoother,and more in line with the Chinese expressing and reading habits.It is hoped that through this translation project,the translator's overall translation skills will be improved,linguistic features of historical materials better understood,and more experience in all such endeavors accumulated.It is also hoped that more translators will contribute to the undertakings of introducing and exporting historical materials in a bid to attract more people to cherish and draw on from the valuable history.