A Report Of The E-C Translation Of A Thirst For Empire:How Tea Shaped The Modern World(Chapter 1 And Chapter 2)

This is an English-Chinese translation report on the A Thirst for Empire:How Tea Shaped the Modern World by Erika,Rappaport.The main idea of source text is how tea shaped the modern world in three aspects: the British-dominated colonial industry,commerce as well as food and brew.This translation practice selects Chapter One and Chapter Two as translation material.These two chapters mainly introduce how tea and its practice moved from China to the western world and how tea effected the western world.There has been no Chinese version of the book so far.In the process of producing translation,the translator encounters a variety of actual difficulties,such as,the differences between English and Chinese language and lack of the relevant knowledge about western culture.Hence the report aims at showing the difficulties met in translation and the translation methods to solve the problems.The difficulties are divided into three levels: the lexical level,the syntactic level and the discourse level.The lexical level contains the difficulties in polysemy,extensive meaning of word and proper noun.And the methods of choice of word meaning,extension of word meaning and annotation are adopted to solve the problem in lexical aspects.The difficulty in syntactic level is long and complex sentence.To cope with this kind of sentences,the translator adopts following the original order,reinventing sentences structure and turning phrases into clause.And the methods to solve cohesion translation at discourse level are maintenance of the cohesion in source text,rearrangement of the cohesion in source text and addition or omission of cohesion in source text in order to make the translation fluent and accurate.The translator has gained a lot from this translation practice.First,through this translation practice,the translator has mastered many practical translation methods,and can flexibly apply these methods to deal with different translation problems.Secondly,this translation practice makes the translator understand a lot of historical knowledge and significant people,and also gained a lot of expressions of proper nouns.Through this translation practice,the translator finds the different translation can lead to great differences in the effect of expression and the response of the reader.