A Report On The Chinese-English Translation Of The Speed Of A Big Power-the Rise Of China’s High-speed Railway(Excerpt)

This is a report on the Chinese-English translation of The Speed of a Big Power—the Rise of China’s High-Speed Railway(excerpt).The source text,a typical narrative non-fiction,tells some lively stories in the rise of China’s high-speed railway and records the development of China’s high-speed railway over the past two decades.The author of this report chooses the last chapter of the book with about 25,000 Chinese characters as her translation task.Based on this translation practice,the author examines the whole translation process,analyzes the typical problems encountered,summarizes the general principle and some specific techniques of narrative non-fiction translation,and finishes this report accordingly.The report begins with a brief introduction of the project and its practical significance,and then analyzes the text type and linguistic features of the source text from lexical level and syntactic level.On this basis,the author describes the translation process from three stages: pre-translation preparation,in-translation and post-translation editing,and discusses the important roles of CAT tools,machine translation and retrieval tools in the actual translation practice.Considering the text type and language features of the source text,the author thinks that semantic translation and communicative translation strategies,proposed by the English translation theorist Peter Newmark,are of great significance to the project.Excellent translation for a narrative non-fiction should take into account both documentary and literary features of the source text.The translator should not only accurately convey the information of the source text to the target readers,but also try to help the target readers perceive the inner aesthetic value of a narrative non-fiction.Therefore,guided by semantic and communicative translation strategies,this report summarizes the translation principles and specific methods for narrative non-fiction translation through explaining and analyzing specific cases.The author believes that the translator should mainly adopt semantic translation for the translation of a narrative non-fiction,preserving the literary means of the source text as far as possible and faithfully reproducing the meaning and language style of the source text.Meanwhile,in order to achieve the communicative effect,the translator should employ more communicative translation strategies to overcome the differences in expression,sentence structures and grammatical rules between Chinese and English,so as to make the translation easier to be understood and accepted by the target readers.