A Report On The Translation Of The World For Sale (Excerpts)

This is a report on the English-Chinese translation of the fourth and fifth chapters of The World for Sale.This book is a financial text,written by two journalists from Bloomberg,which describes the rise of commodity traders in the second half of the twentieth century and introduces the operation of commodity trading.The fourth and fifth chapters of the book introduce Andy Hall and Mark Rich,the two commodities traders in charge of commodity trading houses in different periods.The text contains a large number of proper nouns and complex long sentences,as well as narrative descriptions and dialogues,making the text different from ordinary financial texts,which is relaxing and fascinating.The key of this translation practice is to reproduce the author’s writing style while ensuring the accuracy of the content.The theoretical guidance of this translation practice report is the variational translation theory proposed by Professor Huang Zhonglian.Under the guidance of this theory,the problems encountered in the translation process are analyzed and studied in the light of specific cases from three aspects: lexical level,syntactic level,and discoursal level.Then,different flexible methods are adopted to convey the original content as accurately as possible,and display the original style by exerting the translator’s subjective initiative so as to meet the needs of the target readers.On the basis of translation practice,this report explores the application of six variational translation strategies of “addition”,“deletion”,“adaptation”,“editing”,“narration”,“combination” to the translation of financial texts.It is hoped that this report can provide experience and reference for translators of financial texts in the future.