A Report On The Informative Text Translation

The source text of this translation practice is selected from chapter 11 and 12 in Blueprint:the Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society authored by Nicholas A.Christakis.In the selected chapters,genes,culture and rules are the themes,and they are closely related to our societies‘ evolvement and development.According to Peter Newmark‘s arguments,this text is an informative text.Nicholas explains his viewpoints with abundant citation across different fields,and the expression techniques are flexible and logical.However,due to the differences in writing logic and thinking modes between English and Chinese,reproducing the coherence of the text and realizing the communicative function of the translation became the difficult point.After analyzing the source text and studying the relevant theories,the author,as a translator,tries to realize the equivalence of the coherence effect between the translated text and the original text mainly from the two aspects of cohesion and coherence.According to the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan,cohesion mainly includes lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion,which explicitly connect sentences within a text,while coherence is a deep semantic network,which can be inferred by logical relations,context and background information.In terms of cohesion,the author makes a brief analysis on the grammatical means(reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction)and lexical means(repetition and co-occurrence)in the report,and adopts the translation methods of addition,omission and convertion to realize the cohesion of the translation.As for text coherence,Huang Guowen elaborates the relationship between cohesion and coherence,and points out that coherence is a deep semantic network,which usually derives from logical relations,context and background information.Wang Dongfeng believes that text coherence is a multi-dimensionl network,and puts forward grammatical coherence,semantic coherence,pragmatic coherence and stylistic coherence.He applied textual theory to translation,providing more detailed translation guidance for translators.On this basis,the author makes an analysis from the aspects of logic,pragmatics and style,and carries out logical transformation,implicit logic manifestation and stylistic rhetoric translation in order to achieve the coherence of the translation.This translation practice report consists of five parts: source text description,process description,translation theoretical basis,case studies and summary.The first part briefly introduces the original text and explains the research values.And then in the translation process,the preparations and translation activities are elaborated in detail,including the text analysis and translation theories.Then a briefly translation theory is presented.The body part analyzes the SL text and provides corresponding translation methods on the basis of translation theory and difference between English and Chinese.In the final part,a brief conclusion was given to present the experiences and limits of this translation.