English-Chinese Translation Strategies On Terms In Academic Works

In her Translated People,Translated Texts:Language and Migration in Contemporary African Literature,Tina Steiner explores how language has influence on the culture and identity of immigrants as well as how the environment shapes a person by analyzing the novels of four African immigrant writers.The fourth chapter of Translated People,Translated Texts-"Mimicry or Translation" is chosen to translate and be analyzed as a study case in this report.In this chapter,Dr.Steiner discusses the importance of storytelling for the migrants and distinguishes the concepts of mimicry and translation from the perspective of cultural translation by studying the Admiring Silence and By the Sea of Abdulrazak Gurnah.This chapter is featured with abundant terms related to postcolonialism and translation studies.Therefore,the terms in this academic work are taken as the object of research.Five principles of term translation are concluded based on previous studies,namely,the principles of transparency,accordance,brevity,relevance and context.The terms to be translated are classified into two groups-the terms with existing translations and the those without based on previous studies.For the former group,it can be further classified into terms with standardized translation and those without.For the terms with standardized translation,a translator should have the awareness of principles and adopt the standardized translation.For the terms without standardized translation,a translator should differentiate different versions and pick the most proper one.Drawing on the skills of term retrieval,a three-step method of checking,tracing the source and verification is concluded to translate the terms without existing translations and these terms should be translated with the methods of trial translation or translating by making definition based on the five principles mentioned above.It is expected that this report can help people have a better understanding of postcolonial translation and provide more cases and some references for the follow-up translators and researchers.