A Translation Practice Report Of The Splendid And The Vile (Chapters 1-4)

This is a practice report on English-Chinese translation of The Splendid and the Vile,a nonfiction written by an American writer Erik Larson.Chapter 1 to chapter 4of this book are chosen as the translation material of this report.The book focuses on the story of the British leader Winston Churchill leading the British people against the Nazi invasion in his first year in office(1940-1941).The author uses the special writing type of "non-fiction" to describe Churchill’s heroic deeds in vivid and exquisite language,so that readers can have a deep understanding of the personality of the Prime Minister.Translating this book not only enables Chinese readers to understand the history of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill fighting against the Nazi’s air strikes between 1940 and 1941 with his family and friends,but also arouses readers’ reflection on the current COVID-19 epidemic and help them realize the significance of world peace and security.According to the real historical events,this non-fictional literary output has the characteristics of both an informative text and an expressive text.For this translation task,the translator not only needs to accurately convey the original content,but also tries to master the cultural background information involved in the source text.Specifically,how to achieve popularity and conciseness in title translation is an important and difficult point in translation;the important and difficult points in lexical aspects are mainly reflected in the meaning of familiar words and the translation of abstract nouns;in sentence translation,it is hard to address the long and difficult sentences,while at the textual level,the key and difficult point is to retain the original style and grasp the cohesion and coherence of the whole text.Based on the above reasons,the translator chooses the Skopos Theory,starting from the three major principles of Skopos Theory,namely,the principle of purpose,the principle of fidelity and the principle of coherence.This report focuses on how to adopt effective translation strategies and techniques to achieve translation purposes from the five levels of cultural background,title,vocabulary,syntax and discourse.First of all,the translator learns the relevant background information on the Internet and adopts the translation techniques of free translation and amplification to address the translation problems caused by the lack of cultural background knowledge.Secondly,the translator also uses translation techniques of amplification,part-of-speech transformation,semantic conversion and extension to solve the problems of title and lexical translations.Thirdly,the translator adopts inversion,restructuring,division and combination and other translation techniques to solve the difficulties in syntactic translation.In terms of the textual level,the translator concentrates on sentence cohesion and semantic coherence under the premise of retaining the original style,so as to achieve the purpose of translation.In conclusion,the translator summarizes the difficulties arising in the translating process,through which she verily perceives that translation is not merely the transformation between two different languages,but also it involves the translator’s command of the cultural background information.In addition,the translator should take the intention of the original author into consideration and avoid over-translation.Through this report,the translator hopes to provide references for future translation of historical nonfiction texts on historical materials under the guidance of Skopos Theory.