A Report On The English-chinese Translation Of Unruly Waters:How Rains,Rivers,Coasts And Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History(Excerpt)

This translation report employs chapter from UNRULY WATERS How Rains,Rivers,Coasts,and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History as case texts.This book,written by Sunil Amrith,winner of the Mac Arthur Fellows Program and professor of history at Yale University whose research interests include Southeast Asia,tells readers about the long quest of Asian countries to tame Asian water.Unlike other historical literature,it gives reader a water-related perspective of the history of Asia,highlighting water—mainly refers to rains,rivers and sea—as the key element of Asian history,rather than the conventional viewpoints that put emphasis on man-made influences.The translator follows four steps—text selection,text analysis,text translation and translation proofread—and implements them in the order of priority.To explain the reason why translator uses those guidelines,report also attempts to find evidences from George steiner’s hermeneutics,text typology theory and text manipulation theory.It could improve the readability of translated text that readers could get a new view about Asia.The report involves four chapters.The first chapter focuses on text selection;The second chapter is about text analysis which analyzes the character of text language with text typology;The third chapter presents text translation and explains why translator employs five translation techniques,including word selection,literal translation,separation,combination and interlinear notes,these translation techniques are inspired by text manipulation theory and George Steiner’s hermeneutics;The fourth chapter demonstrates translation proofreading,it provides the representation of proofreading measures that could improve translation,and provides evidences of the proofreading from text manipulation.At the end of the report,it summarizes experiences from the translation and limitations of it,providing practical experiences for the translations of the same type of text.