The E-C Translation Report Of The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction To Human Geography (the 12th Edition)

Geography,as an interdisciplinary study,emphasizing upon the relevance of geographic concepts to human problems,has implication to understanding of the universe and the practical world.Translated geography textbooks from diverse sources provide additional resources to enlarge the perspectives in the field.The Cultural landscape-An Introduction to Human Geography(the 12 th Edition),is such a geography textbook,published by Pearson Education,Inc.in 2017.The goal the author has in selecting the book as the source text for her translation project is that,hopefully,it may serve as additional resources to expand the vision of the study of the field.Based on the characteristics of the source language,the author adopts Skopos theory proposed by Hans J.Vermeer,an important figure of German functionalist translation school,as the guiding theory to complete the translation of the source text.In this report,the key and difficult points encountered in the translation process are illustrated,and the corresponding translation strategies are put forward from three levels.In the lexical level,literal translation,annotation,amplification,paraphrase and adaptation are employed to deal with translation of terminology,acronym,and typical nominal expressions;in the syntactic level,translation methods such as explicitation,compression,reconstruction and conversion are adopted to achieve semantic equivalence and syntactical flexibility;in the discourse level,anaphora and cataphora methods are used to address the cohesion and coherence between the sentences and achieve logic unity.By doing so,the author aims to prove the feasibility of Skopos theory in guiding the practice,in the meanwhile,hopes to improve her competence in translation and provide some references for later textbook translators as well.Through this translation practice,the author realizes that the so-called “breaking away from the shackles of the original text centered theory” is not to create boldly without giving enough thought of the original language under the guidance of Skopos theory,but to translate under the skopos rule to localize the language properly,so as to realize the expected function of the target language.The author finds that although there are differences between the source language and the target language in expression,difficulty of translation could be solved by taking consideration of the distinctive features of source language and target language.In the process,translators should make careful analysis before translating and strictly follow the fidelity rule and coherence rule to reproduce the logic of the source language in the target language with the help of translation strategies,so as to avoid rendering illogical and inaccurate information.