Translation Report On "Biden As A Liberal Crusader:Assessing The Obamabiden Human Rights Legacy"

The source text of this translation task is the paper “Biden as a Liberal Crusader: Assessing the Obama-Biden Human Rights Legacy” written by Sarada Subhash who is a Research Assistant at the Vivekananda International Foundation(VIF).The paper discusses some of the major human rights issues during the Obama-Biden administration,explores its background and major causes,analyzes the basic logic of the US government’s foreign policy decisions,and finally provides directions for the international community to further understand what the US government has done on human rights issues and to predict how it will deal with other human rights issues in the future.The target text can not only convey those above to the target-language audience,but also provides materials and ideas for domestic researches on the US foreign policy and its major human rights issues.Moreover,the target-language audience can get a glimpse into the attitudes of India think tanks/scholars towards the US foreign policies and human rights issues.The translator applies Christiane Nord’s translation-oriented text analysis model to this translation task.Under the guidance of the theory,the translator first analyzed the target-text function,then analyzed the extratextual factors and intratextual factors of the source text,and subsequently decided on proper translation strategies based on the summary of all these analyses,including “ensuring accuracy on lexical level,“complying with Chinese ways of expression”,“providing necessary information”,“highlighting theme-related content”,“adjusting ideologyrelated translation”.These strategies can not only deal with potential ideological issues,but also help target-language audience accurately understand the main idea of the source text,resulting in a better realization of the function of the target text.Besides,these translation strategies may be considered to have certain reference value for future translation of politics-related academic texts.The major findings of this translation task are as follows.On the one hand,Nord’s text analysis model can guide translators to understand the communicative situation of the text,as well as its internal structure,such as the structure of language,and then help translators comprehend the source text fully and deeply,laying the foundation for choosing appropriate translation strategies.On the other hand,in an ideal situation,it is best to comprehensively analyze the sixteen factors defined by Nord,but translators can omit some aspects of the extratextual/intratextual factors according to the specific situation,focusing on the key aspects.