A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of The Games:A Global History Of The Olympics(Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Information Theory

The Games:A Global History of The Olympics is David Goldblatt’s representative work.This book is very popular abroad,and it tells the history of the Olympic Games,major Olympic events and the evolution of sports events.This book consists of nine chapters,and this thesis is a translation practice report of chapter two:"ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR:The Olympics at the End of the Belle Epoque".This partially narrative book mainly contains complex and long sentences and few short sentences.In translation,the author encountered two major problems.On the one hand,as there are plenty of long and difficult sentences in the source text,which carry a lot of redundant information,the target readers may fail to decode the translated text.The author finds that there are a lot of redundant information in the text that affects the decoding ability of the target readers.On the other hand,due to the broken characteristics of the book and the lack of obvious cohesion among the contexts,this book defaults to some background information that the source readers know but the target readers don’t know.In this regard,these background information is necessary redundancy which should be manifested.In view of the problem of long sentence with a large amount of redundant information encountered in translation,the author mainly adopts the way of omission and compressing information to reduce the redundancy of the text so as to alleviate the readers’ reading fatigue and fidgety,giving the readers confidence and motivation to continue reading;while for the second problem encountered in translation,the author mainly adopts the means of addition translation,increasing the redundancy of the text to make up for the defaulted part of the information,so as to improve the readers’ decoding ability of information.Of course,in addition to the two main translation techniques of addition and omission,other translation techniques,such as division translation and combined translation,are inevitably applied.This paper does not make specific discussion about these,but specifically analyzes the text from three aspects:the lexical level,the syntactic level and the discourse level.The author intends that this paper can explore the application of Information Theory on translation practice.