A Report On The E-C Translation Of The United States And Canada:The Land And The People(Excerpts)

With the continuous development of economy and society,people gradually realize the importance of developing a harmonious man-nature relationship.Learning some knowledge about human geography can help people understand the relationship between human beings and geographical environment,and enable them to utilize and transform the geographical environment reasonably to achieve sustainable development.In view of this,translating excellent foreign books on human geography enables the target readers to learn and understand the knowledge of human geography from foreign countries,so that they can use the advanced knowledge to improve their geographical environment.The author of this report has translated some parts of the book The United States and Canada: The Land and the People.It is an excellent book about human geography which mainly discusses the relationship between geographical environment and people's life.It is very objective,highly readable and rich in content.The report takes as the research subject the author's selective translation of The United States and Canada: The Land and the People(Chapters 11-12).It summarizes the features of this book from the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels,and gives a brief introduction to the translation project and relevance theory which has been used as a theoretical basis in the report.Relevance theory holds that translation is a dual ostensive-inferential communicative process.In the first ostensive-inferential process,the translator acts as a reader and tries todeduce the original author's informative and communicative intentions.In the second ostensive-inferential process,the translator should convey the original author's intentions accurately to the target readers with their cognitive contexts in consideration.In the process of translation,the translator should aim to make his or her translation achieve optimal relevance and ensure that the target readers can get enough contextual effects without unjustifiable effort.The United States and Canada: The Land and the People contains a lot of proper nouns,terminologies and abbreviations at the lexical level.At the syntactic level there frequently appear passive sentences as well as long and complicated sentences.As regards the discourse level,it pays great attention to textual cohesion and coherence.According to these features,the report analyzes and summarizes the methods used in the selective translation of this book for achieving optimal relevance at the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels from the perspective of relevance theory.The translated version mainly uses conversion of parts of speech,amplification and omission at the lexical level when literal translation is not feasible.At the syntactic level,it resorts to linear translation,division,reconstruction and conversion of voices.And at the discourse level,it adopts the reproduction,omission and transformation of cohesive devices.By means of the above methods,the translated version succeeds in achieving optimal relevance at the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels and enables the target readers to get adequate contextual effects with minimum processing effort.All in all,the translated version aims to achieve optimal relevance at the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels on the basis of being faithful tothe source text.It expects to be smooth and fluent through the above methods so that it can be well understood and accepted by the target readers and provide references for future English-Chinese translations of texts relating to human geography.