An English-Chinese Translation Report On A Student’s Introduction To English Grammar (Chapters 8-9)

This is an English-Chinese translation report,the source text of which is selected from Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine of A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar,written by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K.Pullum.The book is a descriptive grammar textbook.The eighth chapter “Negation and related phenomena” mainly describes the types of negation.The ninth chapter “clause type: asking,exclaiming,and directing” concerns itself with a detailed study of clause types and the speech acts performed by them.The opening chapter will introduce the book and the authors of the book,as well as the significance of the translation project and the structure of the report.The second chapter describes the preparation before translation,the procedure of the translation and the proofreading after translation respectively.Chapter three illustrates the difficulties during the translation;correspondingly,the fourth chapter intends to investigate a broad spectrum of solutions to those difficulties and unfolds solutions from three levels.The semantic level involves not only the extension of word meaning,the splitting of words,the interchange of conjunctions “and” and “or”,dealing with singular and plural,the conversion between negation and affirmation,but also the modulation techniques of transformation of part of speech,concretization,effect for cause,cause for effect and the reversal of terms.Some of the modulation skills are to translate from different perspectives to make sure the target text can be understood easily.At the syntactic level,division and reinventing sentence structures ensure structural problems are solved.At the textual level,cohesive devices such as ellipsis and lexical cohesion are mainly discussed.Ellipsis includes omitting the references and repetition in the target text.Lexical cohesion involves the use of repetition to make the Chinese authentic.Through the whole process of translation,there are some achievements,reflections and limitations.The solutions utilized here come in useful to deal with other practical translations except for a few limitations anyway.There are also a couple of suggestions for further study and practice.This report offers several translation experience and just makes a superficial attempt at grammar translations and there must be different perspectives and skills to deal with these translation difficulties;correspondingly,translation criticism is spurred.