E-C Translation Report Of Literary Theory (Excerpt)

The source text of this translation report is taken from Chapter Two of Literary Theory--A Guide for the Perplexed,which was written by American scholar Mary Klages.The title of Chapter Two is Humanist Literary Theory.The reason for the translator's choice of Literary Theory as her source text is that she hopes to improve her E-C translation skills for academic texts and to stimulate students of English to take an interest in reading academic work in their field.The source text is an academic work,which belongs to the genre of information text.Its language is rigorous and formal,and its logic is strong,for it attaches great importance to text cohesion and discourse coherence.Translation should therefore focus on faithfulness to the original text and accurate transmission of information.For the translator,how to achieve text cohesion and discourse coherence is a real challenge.The specific difficulties she has met are:(1)difficulty caused by usage of reference;(2)difficulty caused by absence of conjunction.In order to solve these difficulties,this report draws on the theory of cohesion and coherence developed by M.A.K.Halliday.In view of the first type of difficulty,the translator adopts the methods of omission,reiteration,amplification and conversion;in view of the second type of difficulty,the translator adopts the methods of adding additive conjunctions,adversative conjunctions,causal conjunctions and temporal conjunctions.This translation practice proves that these methods or strategies do help solve the problem of achieving text cohesion or discourse coherence in academic text.However,the translator only manages to explore some typical difficulties in academic text translation,while other difficulties in translation remain to be further explored and overcome.