A Translation Report On A History Of British,Irish And American Literature ( Chapter Ⅵ)

This translation report is based on the sixth chapter of A History of British,Irish and American Literature.This chapter mainly expounds the development process of American literature history.The book,written by Hans Peter Wagner,was published in2003 and revised in 2010.The translation report is based on the latest edition.The book is an academic work,covering the history of English literature,American literature and Irish literature.The original author gives a systematic and detailed account of the development of literature about these three countries,and serves the readers with the major writers and their respective works with far-reaching influence.The whole book covers 580 pages,with more than 300,000 words in total,English and Irish literature have been translated by other translators.The number of the selected parts covers about12,000 words,mainly including popular fiction and science fiction of American literature.This translation report is mainly guided by the functional equivalence theory put forward by Eugene A.Nida,a famous translation theorist.Source text is an information text about history of literature and gives priority to objective facts,so translator should adopt the faithfulness-centered translation theory to make the translation closer to the original.There are many such translation theories.For instance,Peter Newmark’s communicative translation theory mainly conveys information to the target language readers.Because of many cultural translation involved in the original text and discussing with my tutor on the whole text,the translator chose another more suitable theory--functional equivalence theory.This theory refers to the functional equivalence between the source language and the target language rather than the literal one-to-one correspondence.This equivalence also includes semantic and stylistic equivalence in addition to lexical equivalence.Based on this theory,the translator will analyze the translation of the source text from four aspects: lexicon,syntax,text and style.This report is mainly composed of five parts.The first part explains the background and meaning of the translation report in detail from the aspects of the readerand the translator as well as the structure of the report.The second part describes the introduction of the original text,which mainly introduces the content,analyzes text types and language styles and,the author and the reasons for the material selection.The third part further introduces formal equivalence,the functional equivalence theory and its development.The fourth part is case analysis.The translator mainly combines the theory and lists some typical translations in the original text,such as the title of the books,long and difficult sentences,passive sentences,and chooses right translation methods and techniques like literal translation,transliteration and others.These two chapters are the core parts of the report.The fifth part delivers the summary of the whole translation project,including unsolved problems and the direction of efforts.It is hoped that the completion of this translation report will play a guiding role in the future translation of such texts and provide references for other translators.