A Report On Chinese Translation Of The Last Lion:Visions Of Glory(Chapter Two)

The report is made on the basis of a biographical work,The Last Lion: Visions of Glory,by William Manchester,a famous American soldier and biographer.In the second chapter of the book,“The Stream Chapter,” the translator has selected pages277 to 303 with 11,518 English words.The chapter mainly tells the experience of Churchill’s low point in the process of transforming from a soldier to a politician and involves many historical events,which are informative and readable.Besides,a vivid portrayal of the particular historical and cultural environment of Churchill’s life is also provided in this chapter,successfully shaping an influential historical figure.The original text is complex in its logical relations and dense and coherent information.It can be seen that discourse exhibits coherence characteristics at the grammatical,semantic,and pragmatic levels.Therefore,this translation practice report utilizes Wang Dongfeng’s theory of Coherence and Translation to discuss the coherence of translations at three levels: grammatical coherence,semantic coherence,and pragmatic coherence.It has been found that transcribers can achieve discourse grammatical coherence through cohesion strategies such as reference,substitution,ellipsis,and conjunction.In two translation strategies,reiteration and collocation,sentence constituents and semantic fields are analyzed so that more precise words can be selected and semantic coherence is ensured.The translator’s choice of adding cultural information and conveying implicit meaning can enhance readability from a pragmatic perspective.This can achieve pragmatic coherence.As a result of this translation practice,Chinese readers interested in Churchill and the historical background of his era should be able to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this historical figure and his history.This report discusses the critical guiding role of coherence theory in the translation of biographical texts and serves as a source of reference for biographical literary translation in the future.