An E-C Translation Report On OECD Digital Education Outlook 2021(Excerpts)

This translation practice report is selected from the OECD Digital Education Outlook 2021: Pushing the Frontiers with Artificial Intelligence,Blockchain and Robotics published by OECD in June 2021.According to Newmark’s text typology,the source text belongs to informative text,with strong logic,objective content and rigorous expression.Working with Newmark’s communicative translation theory,the author summarizes the main difficulties and proposes corresponding tactics in translating adverbial clauses in English informative texts.By analyzing and defining the translation problems found in the process of translation practice,the difficulties are categorized as follows:(1)difficulty in transferring sentence structures,including dealing with the different positions of adverbials in English and Chinese,and the complex sentence structures with adverbial clauses;(2)difficulty in clarifying logical relations,including dealing with cohesive devices and achieving coherent relation of sentences in E-C translating adverbial clauses.According to Newmark’s view of “communicative translation”,the translation should reproduce in the target language the same effect felt by the reader of the original as far as possible.In informative texts,the content of the message to be conveyed is more important than the manner and means of expression,so the translator needn’t to entirely conform to the language form of the original text,but should translate according to the accustoms accepted.In this regard,this report proposes a solution by sentence reconstruction:(1)For transferring sentence structures,“shifting” is adopted in dealing with the different positions of adverbials,and tactics of “division” and “conversion of sentence constituents” are employed to deal with the complex sentence structures;(2)For clarifying logical relations,tactics of “omission” and “conversion of cohesive devices” are used for dealing with cohesive devices,and “amplification” and “integration” are adopted to achieve the coherent relation of sentences in translation.This study explores the E-C translation strategies of adverbial clauses,aiming to provide reference for the Chinese translation of the English adverbial clauses in informative texts,and at the same time deepen readers’ understanding of the latest development trends in digital education.