A Practice Report On E-C Translation Of My Own Words (Excerpts)

The source text of this report is selected from My Own Words written by biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W.Williams.The book tells the story of the famous American Justice Ruth Ginsburg: her life experience,accomplishment,and her contribution to promoting the gender equality in legislation and contains her essays.Through the translation practice,the history of the development of equal rights between men and women is presented.This report also provides study cases for the translation of biography.This report summarizes and analyzes the translation process of My Own Words(excerpts),the problems encountered in translation,and corresponding solutions.The original text is a biography text about the Grand Justice Ginsberg,which not only involves the description of legal cases,but also contains persuasive words.Therefore,the text has the characteristics of informative text and vocative text at the same time.Guided by semantic translation and communicative translation,the author translates the source text,and flexibly uses division,amplification,conversion,and inversion in order to achieve the best translation effect.Lexical translation includes the translation of legal terms and cultural words mainly under the guidance of semantic translation,which are generally unfamiliar to some readers and contain specific background information.Thus,it is quite difficult for readers to fully understand the original text and the author’s intentions literally.In response to these problems,annotation is mainly used to provide background information.In syntactic translation,the author analyzes complex sentences,compound sentences and passive sentences.Most of the sentences in the source text are so long and difficult with complex structure to understand.The typical three types of sentence patterns are analyzed,and division,inversion and conversion are flexibly used according to the text type,so as to convey the information of the original text more clearly.At the discourse level,the author analyzes cohesion and style of translation,and unifies the language style of the source text and translated text according to the text type,so as to make the translation cohesive and semantically coherent.To achieve the best effect,syntactic and discourse translation are mainly under the guidance of communicative translation.Through this translation practice,a biographical text commonly has more than one single text type.Therefore,it is necessary to identify the text type according to the function and features of the source text.This practice is mainly under the guidance of communicative translation and semantic translation which play an important role in the translation of biography.