A Report On The Translation Of Lincoln’s Last Trial:The Murder Case That Propelled Him To The Presidency (Excerpts)

This report is based on the translation of Chapter Five to Seven of Lincoln’s Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency which is co-written by American best-selling writers,Dan Abrams and David Fisher.This book is categorized as documentary literature,featuring “authenticity” and “literariness”.It depicts in detail the true story of Abraham Lincoln’s last murder trial through the eyes of Robert Roberts Hitt,a court stenographer,in an attempt to reveal a previously unexplored corner of history about Lincoln.The translation of this book aims to provide an opportunity for Chinese readers to know more about this great man.In the process of translating,the practical translating problems the translator encounters are: to precisely reproduce the writing style of the authors;to check and cross-check all the legal terminologies included in the SL;to deal with common but tricky words and phrases as well as long,complex sentences.In response,the translator adopts Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation to deal with such difficulties.This report is divided into four parts,including task description,process description,case study and conclusion.Based on this translation practice,the translator finds that Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation is quite appropriate for documentary literature where semantic translation is applicable to render the exact contextual meaning and language style of the SL while communicative translation is used to overcome difficulties caused by unusual collocations and complex syntactic structures so as to make the TL more acceptable.