A Report On The E-C Translation Of Slow Reading In A Hurried Age (Excerpts)

Living in the computer-driven world,people are surrounded by endless information.They always read quickly for fear of missing any information.As a result,they almost lose the consciousness and capacity of slow reading.In some developed countries,book lovers initiate a new movement calling on people to enjoy slow reading.Under such circumstances,the author chooses the book Slow Reading in a Hurried Age written by American scholar David Mikics as the translation practice material,hoping to help the Chinese readers to settle down for enjoying slow reading and get benefits from it.The author employs German translation theorist Katharine Reiss’ s Text Typology Theory as the guiding theory of this translation practice.Reiss believes that the dominant linguistic function of the text decides its text type and divides the texts into four types,namely content-focused text,form-focused text,appeal-focused text and audio-medial text.She supposes that the translator should adopt appropriate translation methods according to the text type in translating process.Through the task description and analysis,it is found that the source text is an appeal-focused text which is dominated by the appellative function.Meanwhile,it also has informative function.Based on the text type and its linguistic features,the author translates the source text under two translation strategies: 1)use target language-oriented expressions to achieve the appellative effects of the source text;2)use precise language to convey the content of the source text into the target text faithfully.The following conclusions are drawn from this translation practice.Firstly,a specific text may have more than one linguistic function,but in translating process,the translator should always give the priority to the achievement of the dominant linguistic function,and then consider the realization of the other linguistic functions;secondly,some translation methods can help to achieve the appellative function and informative function of the source text,such asamplification,substitution,annotation,division,restructuring,and in many cases,several of them need to be used simultaneously;thirdly,a good translator must be a generalist with general knowledge of different fields.It is hoped that this report would provide reference for the further translation and study of the appeal-focused texts in the future.