Translation Practice Report On Media Society:A Method To Interpret Modern Society

This is a report on my translation practice of Media Society: A Method to Interpret Modern Society by Takashi Sato.Composed of 50 sections,the book selects social events that are closely related to modern media,and illustrates how media such as newspapers,radio,and television shape the society and public memory.Although the book was published in 2006,Sato’s insights still hold true.Until 2021,there’s no Chinese version has been published yet.Therefore,the author chooses the third and the fourth chapter of the book as the object of translation practice.This book is categorized as non-literary text,its language style is concise but the sentence pattern is complex,it aims at information transmission.These characteristics sets a high demand on translation practice.According to Chinese translator Li Changshuang(2004),the goal of translating non-literary texts is to accurately convey the message in the text.Therefore,the author needs to ensure accuracy to reproduce the objective facts that the original text contains.To achieve the goals,the author adopts the translation model proposed by Vinay Jean-Paul and Darbelnet.They point out that translation is the translation of "meaning" and "translation operates in the realm of meaning",which consistent with the requirement of "convey information".There are many difficulties in the translation process.One of the difficulties is that,from the perspective of media history,the author refers to a large number of obscure terms including the special terms used during the Pacific War.Secondly,Sato’s writing style is simple,but he uses many abstract words.On the other hand,the same words are often used repeatedly,and it is inappropriate to convert such Japanese words into Chinese words.Thirdly,there are many complex and long sentences in the whole book.Japanese sentences always focus on the subject or object of the story,thus the passive voice is often used,which largely differs from the way Chinese works.After encountering difficulties in translation,the author seeks the help of the five steps of translation and the seven translation procedures by Vinay and Darbelnet.The composition of the report is as follows.The first chapter will briefly introduce the content of Media Society: A Method to interpret Modern Society.Examples are given to illustrate the features of the origin text.Analysis in this part shows their translation model provides guidance for overcoming translation difficulties at the text-symbol level.The second chapter contains a brief summary of Vinay and Darbelnet’ s translation model in the history of translation studies.Then,by giving examples,the author tried to demonstrates the effectiveness of their 5 steps method.In the last chapter,the author chooses typical cases from translation practice to analyze how the seven strategies help the author overcome translation barriers.Through the examination of the cases,the author believes that when translating texts containing foreign cultural elements,it is necessary to read relevant documents to grasp the specific meaning of the noun the author’s attitude,and the attitude of the culture of the target language toward the same thing,and then flexibly combine borrowing,calque,and adaption to achieve the purpose of accurately conveying the message of the original text.Secondly,in order to overcome the difficulties caused by the differences in the structure of the Chinese and Japanese languages,it is necessary to understand both languages from the perspective of grammatical functions,and flexibly use the techniques of transposition,modulation,and adaption to cross the language barrier and produce a natural translation text.Especially when translating long and complex sentences,it is necessary to use a combination of five steps and seven types of strategies to overcome cultural and linguistic differences and to fully convey the message.