Translation Of Culture-loaded Words Guided By Newmark’s Translation Theories

This translation practice report is based on The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks written by Ben Cohen.Cohen works as a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and writes mainly about NBA and the Olympics.What is worth mentioning is that he is a pioneering sports reporter in terms of combining sports and psychology,especially studying behavioral science and cognitive biases.With respect to the book,it dives into data collected on streaks and provides anecdotal evidence of big time names such as Stephen Curry and Shakespeare in order to illustrate instances regarding where and why the “hot hand” presented itself.What’s more,the book not only discusses the decisions we make every day and the way we perceive the world around us but also demonstrates how The Hot Hand Fallacy may be evaded and how to differentiate between random and skilled performances.The translator chose The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks as the source text and two translation theories,namely,semantic translation and communicative translation,as the theoretical framework to analyze the features of culture-loaded words in the book and summarize the translation strategies of culture-loaded words in this type of source text.With respect to the translation purposes,the translator aimed to improve his translation skills and readers’ cognitive ability and deepen our understanding of cognitive psychology.In addition to the classification of culture-loaded words,their lexical meaning and corresponding translation mode were elaborated.The most remarkable feature of the source text consists in the combination of introduction to narrative stories of celebrities with the presentation of scientific data.In other words,the source text mixes human emotions and scientific data.Accordingly,the methods of semantic translation and communicative translation proposed by Newmark(2001)were adopted as the theoretical guidance on translation.On the basis of semantic and communicative theories,translation methods including conversion,amplification,four-character structure,free translation,idiomatic translation,literal translation,comment and annotation were employed for analyzing and translating the typical cases.The ultimate goal of translation is to reveal the culture phenomenon with a prerequisite of retaining the intention of the author.