Annotation In Translating English Informative Texts

One of the difficulties of translating informative texts is to convey professional information and concepts.Literal translation alone is not likely to reach ideal translation effect and help readers acquire background information and understand the context.To overcome the difficulty,one of the translation strategies that can be adopted is adding annotations for unfamiliar proper nouns and other difficult concepts.Through literature review,it is concluded that the previous studies of annotation mostly focus on literary texts or macro fields without paying attention to a particular text or text type.Also,they are concerned with principles of adding annotations rather than approaches to adding them.According to the research landscape,this thesis explores the following four research questions based on the translation practice of Scattered Finds:1)how to select the targets to be annotated,2)how to select sources of annotations,3)how to select the form of annotations,4)how to constitute the body part of annotations in different classifications.Through the methodology of case study,four conclusions are made.1)The targets to be annotated include unfamiliar proper nouns,other difficult concepts and acronyms.2)Annotations can refer to three kinds of information sources:the Chinese edition of officially-published encyclopedias,translation of the English encyclopedias as well as carefully examined online information.3)The selection of forms:intra-contextual supplement is used for explaining important names of persons while footnote is applied to other more complicated concepts,including places of archaeological and historical significance.4)The constitution of an annotation should consider the classification it belongs to and the context as well.This thesis is expected to extend the text type of annotation studies and offer some help to similar researches in terms of how to add annotations.