E-C Translation Of Historical Texts From The Perspective Of The Interpretive Theory

The Epic of America is a literary history text written by James Truslow Adams,famous American historian and writer.Based on the translation of chapter 11 of The Epic of America,this report discusses the translation difficulties and the solving strategies in the translation practice.Interpretive theory holds that translation is a kind of communicative action whose purpose is to convey communicative meaning.As an important point of interpretive theory,the triangular model,understanding-deverbalization-expression,emphasizes breaking away from the form of the source language and focusing on the transmission of meaning.In addition,interpretive theory proposes to supplement the original text cognitively and emphasizes the role of subject matter knowledge,encyclopedic knowledge,context and emotional factors in translation.Applying the interpretive theory,this report classifies and analyzes the difficulties encountered and the appropriate strategies applied by me to revise the translation from three aspects,namely understanding,deverbalization and re-expression.To ensure accurate understanding of the original text,it is suggested that parallel texts should be read to complement subject knowledge before starting to translate and during the translation process,and special attention should be paid to the context and search engines be used to consult encyclopedic knowledge.Strategies like addition,omission,separation and reorganization can be adopted to avoid word to word translation,to maintain readability,to eliminate ambiguity and illogical statements so that the translation will manifest as much as possible the author’s writing style.Moreover,computer aided translation software and electronic dictionary are also used in the process,which could not only help improve translation efficiency but also assure the translation quality to some extent.