A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of The Contemporary Testament

Religious literature always plays an important role in studying the culture of a country and in international communication.As the saying goes,to understand a nation,one must first understand its culture.The religious works,full of national and cultural characteristics,can help to accelerate people’s understanding of a nation.Therefore translating a book of religion that could meet the reading taste of target readers becomes very significant.To this end,the translator decided to translate The Contemporary Testament.In August 2019,Fiberead,an online translation publishing platform,recruited translators for a religious book The Contemporary Testament.After carefully screening,the translator and other two translators were finally authorized to complete the translation project.This book contains twenty chapters,and the translator is responsible for translating five chapters of it,on which this report is based.This report consists of five chapters,beginning with task background,linguistic features of the source text and significance of the project.The second chapter describes the translation process,including pre-translation preparations,during translation and proofreading and refining.Then in chapter three,the translator presents a brief introduction to the guiding theory,Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation,which lays a solid theoretical foundation for case analysis,which is the main part of this report.In this part,the main applied translation strategies are generally illustrated from lexical,syntactic and textual levels.At lexical level,strategies like literal translation,free translation,transliteration and annotation were applied to deal with typical words like religious words and cultural-loaded words.Through analyzing different language habits between Chinese and English,the translator adopted conversion to deal with some common nouns.While at syntactic level,the most helpful strategies include division of long and difficult sentences,amplification of elliptical sentences and inversion of complex sentences.When it comes to the textual level,the logic and the unity of sentences are strengthened through applying strategies such as cohesion and coherence.In the last chapter,the translator introspects the whole translation practice and summarizes what shehas gained from the practice.