A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Obituary From The Economist

This report is based on the author’s translation on Obituary from the Economists.This author has translated 10 articles(obituaries)from English to Chinese,with the purpose of helping Chinese readers understand the life stories of famous foreign cultural figures and their historical evaluation by later generations,and helping them learn the rough ideas of the writing mode and discourse logic in English obituary reports.The report discusses the translation difficulties in these obituary reports through case studies and summarizes the coping strategies in the translation process.There are three major difficulties: firstly,the translation of headline.This type of text is essentially soft news,and the headline of each obituary contains three to five words that highly crystalize life of the dead.Thus whether the title can be properly rendered to attract readers’ interest is a difficult point in translation.The second difficult point is the translation of compound sentences.which are rich in clause types and sometimes ambiguity in grammatical structure.The third difficult point is the translation of,the textual coherence.As the obituaries contains many parentheses and various types of demonstrative and personal pronouns,and many culture-loaded words as well,it is difficult for the translator to clarify the obscure inner logic and render the hidden information.In order to solve above problems,the author adopts Translation Variation Theory as the guiding principles in her translation.In translating headlines,the author resorts to such approaches as adding relevant backgrounds and adopting four-character words;in translating compound sentences,the author adopts such translation skills as deleting unnecessary information,paraphrasing descriptive information and narrating general idea;lastly,the author employs detailed explanation,combining simple sentences and rearranging sentence sequence to ensure coherence.Through above strategies,the author tries to make the translation readable,coherent and attractive for target readers,which is above all faithful to their original texts in meaning.In doing so,the purpose of the translation could be better achieved.