| Language is one of the most important inheritances of human society,but now more and more languages are on the verge of extinction.Many domestic scholars have committed to the task of saving and protecting endangered languages.This makes the translation of excellent foreign works of endangered languages become an urgent need.The translator has taken part in the English-Chinese translation of Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties,a book consisting of 15 academic papers on endangered language research.In each chapter,the authors make a probe into an endangered language or language variant by analyzing its current status through field research.This report is based on the translator’s translation practice of chapter five and chapter six.Since the original texts are academic papers,they have the features of formality,objectivity,strong logic,and professionalism in language expression,leading to several difficulties in translation practice.Many terminologies and proper nouns appear at the lexical level;a myriad of long and complicated sentences and passive structures are regularly employed at the syntactical level;demonstrative pronouns and conjunctions are widely used to achieve cohesion and coherence at the discourse level.All of those features pose difficulties to the translator.In response,under the guidance of Functional Equivalence Theory,translation techniques such as annotation,semantic extension,conversion of part of speech,and reconstruction of order are adopted to deal with those difficulties and produce a fairly sound translation.Practice proves that the Functional Equivalence Theory is suitable to guide the translation of academic books.In order to ensure the source text and the target text are equivalent in language function rather than in language form,it is necessary to flexibly adopt various translation techniques to convey the original text information to target readers accurately.The translator also hopes that the suggestions provided in the report might be helpful for translating similar academic papers in the future. |
