A Report On The Translation Of The Boy Travellers In The Far East:Adventures Of Two Youth In A Journey To Japan And China(chapters 1 To 7)

This is a report based on the English-Chinese translation of The Boy Travelers in the Far East:Adventures of Two Youth in a Journey to Japan and China written by the American writer Thomas Wallace Knox in 1879.This book is composed of thirty-one chapters in total,and this translation task excerpts the first seven chapters as the source text with a total number of more than 25,000 English words,and when it is rendered into Chinese,the characters are counted as around 40,000.In this book,three protagonists are portrayed:Doctor Bronson along with his nephew Fred and Fred’s cousin Frank,and mainly describes the travels of the author through the three characters to Japan and China in the late 19^th century.Moreover,these characters are fictitious but most of the incidents they experienced are real,which can trace back to the actual previous footsteps of the author.For the sake of this translation practice,ten commonly-adopted translation skills are selected after the perusal of several prevailing coursebooks for English-Chinese translation.Furthermore,forty-nine examples are cited from the source text to expound how these skills work in the translation process.To put it more specific,translation skills at the lexical level include diction,amplification,annotation,omission and conversion,and skills with perspective shift,skills with division,skills with tense,skills with passive voice and skills with negative structures are selected at the syntactic level.In virtue of the commonly-used translation skills mentioned above,most of the problems encountered in the translation process are solved without much trouble.Nevertheless,in the process of translation,apart from the language per se,non-verbal factors are also supposed to be taken into account,such as the physical conditions of the circumstance,the mental state of the interlocutors,and some social elements,which also exert influence on the translated version,and the translation obstacles caused by these factors cannot be overturned appropriately by the basic translation skills.To this regard,the Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren is resorted to as the guiding theory to deal with these difficulties.According to this theory,context includes two types:communicative context and linguistic context.And communicative context can be further categorized into three worlds:the physical world,the mental world,and the social world.Accordingly,fifteen specific examples are excerpted for analysis in this report.This report consists of five chapters.The first chapter is an overview of the translation task,including a brief introduction to both the source text and the author,the motivation for carrying out this task as well as the overall structure of the report.Chapter Two mainly narrates the translation process,covering pre-translation preparation,while-translation process,and post-translation proofreading respectively.In Chapter Three,ten commonly-adopted translation skills are employed for case analysis.The next chapter introduces the Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren to resolve some difficult problems in the translation practice.As a conclusion part,Chapter Five sums up the experiences and implications through the task,and puts forward several suggestions on the basis of the limitations for further translation practice.