A Report On E-C Translation Of Rulers And Ruled In Ancient Greece,Rome And China(Excerpts)

The selected material of this translation practice report is an excerpt from the first chapter of Rulers and Ruled in Ancient Greece,Rome,and China.In this chapter,the author mainly elaborates on the similarities and differences between the nobles in the western Han Dynasty and the Roman Republic.The selected material is historical text.Generally speaking,historical texts chiefly convey information and feature formality,objectivity,accuracy and seriousness.Based on Bühler’s three-way categorization of the functions of language,Reiss brings forward four types of text in Translation Criticism:Potential and Constraints,and they are form-focused texts,content-focused texts,appeal-focused texts and audio-medial texts.Among those four types of text,content-focused texts are designed to convey information and centre on the content itself.And according to this feature,the source text can be classified as content-focused text.Guided by Reiss’s text typology theory,the translator analyzed and discussed the key issues and difficulties in the translation process.After a full analysis of source text and in accordance with Reiss’s theory,the translator analyses the related translation problems in terms of vocabulary,syntax as well as culture history encountered in this translation practice.At the lexical level,customary translation and explicitation are adopted to deal with a lot of terminologies,words with historical information and words with affective meaning contained in the source text.At the syntactic level,the translator tries to make the translation more fluent through division,combination and restructuring of long and difficult sentences and passive sentences.To deal with the cultural background information involved in the source text,amplification,reference to the parallel text and adding of footnotes are adopted to reduce the readers’ reading barriers.