An E-C Translation Report Of China And The Manchus (Chapter 5-10)

This is a translation report.The translation text is selected from China and The Manchus.The author Herbert Allen Giles is a famous British sinologist.The selected sections focus on the last period of ascendancy for China before the modern era,they include not only the changes of China under Emperor Yung Cheng,Ch`ien Lung,Chia Ch`ing and so on,but also how the Manchus respond to challenges from outside.The original text is a historical text,and the first task of translation is to convey the information accurately.The whole translation process involves three steps,namely preparation before translation,translation process and proofreading after translation.In this translation report,the translator will talk about how to translate the original text and analyze the difficulties encountered in the process of translation and put forward translation methods to solve these difficulties.Difficulties in translation are mainly at two levels,the lexical level and the syntactic level.At the lexical level,the translator will talk about the difficulties involving proper nouns,polysemy and parts of speech.At the syntactic level,the translator will mainly analyze the difficulties in adverbial clauses,attributive clauses,passive sentences and long sentences.Then,the translator will discuss some translation methods according to these translation difficulties and analyze these methods by combining examples in the translation text.At the lexical level,the translator mainly uses the method of transliteration,literal translation and annotation in translating proper nouns.When translating words with multiple meanings,the translator selects the appropriate meaning according to the context.Sometimes,the translator even needs to extend the word meaning when there is no appropriate corresponding Chinese word.At syntactic level,translation difficulties mainly fall on the translation of adverbial clauses,attributive clauses,passive sentences and long sentences.Long sentences are major challenges for the translator.Reinventionis translation method that is used to adjust the orders of sentences,so as to cater for the reading habit of the target readers.Another translation method is following the original syntactic order.This method is especially appropriate for adverbial clause translation.Moreover,division of attributive clause and transformation of passive sentences are the most common methods in the translation field.In order to achieve ideal translation,the translator usually needs to combine several translation methods in translating these sentences.