A Report On The Translation Of From The River To The Sea: The Untold Story Of The Railroad War That Made The West(Excerpts)

This report selects the first to fifth chapters of From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War that Made the West,written by John Sedgwick,as the source text of the translation practice.In these excerpts,the author mainly describes the early stage of the construction process of the Pacific Railroad.The source text is an informative text.This text contains many technical terms,historical events and names of persons related to railway.Meanwhile,the use of rhetorical devices and phonetic features of English can be found many times in the source text.In the process of translation,more or less losses will be caused after the source text has been processed by the translator.This requires the translator to adopt appropriate compensation strategies in accordance with the context and specific circumstances to reduce the losses.In this report,under the direction of communicative translation,the translator discusses the application of translation compensation in the practice by adopting three kinds of compensation strategies proposed by Xia Tingde,including compensation by integration,compensation by isolation as well as compensation with the same device,in the hope of overcoming following translation difficulties: employing compensation by integration to solve the translation problems of figures’ names,abstract nouns and cultural words,using compensation by isolation to solve the problems of translating technical terms and colloquial expressions and supplementing background information,and using compensation with the same device tries to solve the problem related to rhyme and rhetoric.This report is partitioned into five parts.Chapter 1 is an introduction,ranging from the background,purposes and significance of the translation task to the introduction to the source text and the structure of the report;Chapter 2 is the description of the task,including pre-translation preparations,while-translation process and quality control;Chapter 3 begins by giving a basic introduction to the communicative translation theory and the translation compensation;under the guidance of communicative translation theory and from the perspectives of three kinds of compensation strategies,Chapter 4 looks at how to solve translation difficulties in the practice;Chapter 5 presents the findings and limitations of the translation practice.