An E-C Translation Practice Report On Reconstruction Of Complex Sentences In Informative Text Of The Social Psychology Of Humor(Excerpts)

Social psychology is a subject of conducting scientific research on how people treat others,affect others,and connect with others.In recent years,the research on this subject has become more and more in-depth.As a new topic in social psychology,humor has attracted extensive attention.The corpus selected for the translation practice report is Chapter 4 and Chapter 6 of The Social Psychology of Humor.This text provides a comprehensive analysis of humor from a social-psychological perspective,addressing questions about the use of humor in daily life.The text is a series of academic papers in social psychology,possessing objective content,a neutral tone,many professional terms and complex and long sentences.In order to fully explain the content to make readers understand,parentheses are also used more than once to give further explanations.To sum up,the text conforms to the characteristics of informative text in Rice’s Text Typology,focusing on the accurate conveyance of its content and information during the translation.Through the analysis and proofreading after the first translation,the translation difficulties of complex sentences are classified into three categories: frequent parentheses,numerous modifiers,and complex nested clauses.Aiming at the defined translation difficulties,the report tries to adopt sentence structural reconstruction as the translation strategy.To solve the translation difficulties,the report adopts the following methods respectively: order-changing reconstruction and fusion reconstruction for frequent parentheses;restoration reconstruction and conversion reconstruction for complex nested clauses;splitting reconstruction and synthetic reconstruction for numerous modifiers.Through case analysis and summary of translation practice,it is shown that sentence structural reconstruction has a certain guiding significance in the translation of complex sentences in informative texts.It is hoped that this translation practice can provide some reference for other translators to translate the same text type.