A Report On E-C Translation Of Field Notes From A Pandemic From The Perspective Of Tytler’s Three General Laws

This paper is a practice report on English-Chinese translation.The translated text is selected from Ethan Lu’s work Field Notes from a Pandemic,which describes the author’s travel experience around the world during the COVID-19 epidemic.The translator chooses the preface and chapter one,which mainly describes what the author saw,heard and felt in China when the epidemic broke out,with a total of 10287 words.Translating these chapters can make Chinese readers understand China’s family relations,social operation,cultural customs and the life in the epidemic from the perspective of a foreigner,so that readers can have a new understanding of them and help readers to view things in a more objective and comprehensive way.The translation report takes Tytler’s Three General Laws as a guidance theory.The original text has a strong literariness,and the original intention of Tytler’s Three General Laws is to solve literary translation problems,which has a very broad guidance role in literary translation.It constructs a translation framework for the translator,gives the translator more room to translate,and is more suitable for such literary text translation.Under the guidance of Tytler’s Three General Laws,this report conducts cases study from three aspects: reflecting the ideas of the original text,reproducing the style of the original text and achieving the fluency of the target text.It is believed that the ideas of the original text can be reflected through translation methods and skills such as addition,interpretation and annotation;The writing style of the original text can be reproduced from three levels: vocabulary,sentence and rhetoric;The fluency of the target text can be achieved through explicit-implicit conversion,dynamic-static conversion and voice-active conversion.Thus the conclusion is that Tytler’s Three General Laws can effectively guide the translation of the text.Under the guidance of this theory,the translator can not only enjoy a certain degree of freedom and use a variety of translation methods to complete translation practice,but also have laws to follow without deviating from the original intention of translation,so that the original ideas can be faithfully conveyed.At the same time,the translation practice report has certain reference significance for the translation of the same type of text.