A Report On Translation Of What Is Discourse Study (Chapter One)

Discourse studies have been increasingly eye-catching in social sciences.The book What Is Discourse Study by professor Shi-xu taking question-and-answer format introduces the basic theories,core concepts,study methods and academic and innovative trend of discourse studies and on the basis of China's reality puts forward targeted way and strategy for its development.This translation report is based on the translation practice of the first chapter of the book,which is a total of 11 sections.Under the guidance of Peter Newmark's text typology theory,communicative translation and semantic translation are adopted to analyze and explore solutions for difficulties appeared during the translating at four levels.According to the principle that the communicative translation is oriented to readers of target language,the translation should be smooth and clear,in accordance with the habits of target language.Therefore,the translator uses the methods such as addition,combination,and conversion to deal with the differences between English and Chinese in terms of part of speech,expression habits and the problem of understanding caused by the overlapping of English translations of different terms.At sentence level,the translation techniques such as change of the voice,reversion and combination are applied for different English and Chinese syntactic structures.At textual level,cohesion and coherence are achieved by maintenance,omission and addition that of the original text.At cultural level,isomorphism between languages is adopted to solve problems caused by cultural differences.The practice is a guide and an enlightenment to translator's further exploration on academic works and the application of semantic translation and communicative translation based on text analysis.In addition,under the circumstance that most literature on discourse studies is from western scholars,the practice hopes to introduce the work from Chinese scholars to more readers.