An E-C Translation Report Of WHO COVID-19 Reports Based On Text Typology Theory

After the outbreak of the COVID-19,WHO responded quickly and released related reports on its official website.The translation of COVID-19 reports helps target text readers understand the global efforts to respond to COVID-19,thus people’s confidence is enhanced in addressing the pandemic.The translator selected three Weekly Operational Update on COVID-19 from COVID-19 reports released by WHO as the source text,with around 20,000 words.The source text introduces actions taken by the WHO and its partners to respond to COVID-19.Under the guidance of Reiss’ s text typology theory,this translation report analyzes the text types of the source text,thus the appropriate translation techniques and methods are summarized.Reiss classifies texts into three types,namely,informative texts,operative texts and expressive texts.The source text of this translation report is a typical informative text,and a small part can be classified into the operative text and the expressive text.At lexical level,there are many proper nouns and terminologies about COVID-19,and the translator uses literal translation,amplification and conversion to address the two types of words.Also,there are a large number of tables in the text,and the translator chooses literal translation to translate them.At syntactic level,long sentences and passive sentences are commonly seen,and the translator adopts division,restructuring and change of voices to deal with the translation of tables.At discoursal level,there is plenty of information and pronouns in the discourse.In addition,There are also some implicit logical relations in the discourse.The two problems bring some difficulties to the translation.To deal with the two problems,the translator makes the discourse coherent and logical by making pronouns specific and adding logical conjunctions.For the operative and expressive text,the translator uses the literal translation to address problems in translating the two types of texts.Through this translation report,the translator finds that Reiss’ s text typology theory helps the translator to analyze text types,which enables the translator to adopt different translation methods and techniques according to different text types,guiding and improving the translation of the source text well,and making the translator further understand the importance of the combination of translation theories and practice.