A Report On The Translation Of Linguistic Mitigation In English And Spanish(Chapters 3-4)

The translation material of this report is an excerpt from the pragmatic book Linguistic Mitigation in English and Spanish,published by Routledge and edited by Nydia Flores-Ferrán,associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University,New Jersey,USA.This book makes a comprehensive study of mitigation in English and Spanish.It contains nine chapters.The content reveals the phenomena,ways,and reasons behind mitigation,containing important theoretical significance.There are important theoretical implications in this work,and it offers new perspectives for domestic scholars’ research in pragmatics.The source text is an academic text.The writing style is formal,the words are standardized and the content is objective.The text has a significant number of technical terms of pragmatics and psychology at the lexical level,and the nominalization structure is commonly utilized to boost the text’s information-carrying ability.Objectivity and academic characteristics at the syntactic level are often emphasized in the text by using passive sentences and long,difficult sentences.This thesis,guided by Relevance theory,discusses the difficulties encountered in the translation of the academic text at the lexical and syntactical levels,as well as summarizes the strategies used in the translation of academic texts.At the lexical level,literal translation,free translation and other translation methods are adopted in the translation of technical terms;in the translation of nominalization structures,conversion is employed.At the syntactical level,translation strategies such as translating into active sentences and passive sentences were used to deal with passive voice.For the translation of long and difficult sentences,inversion and division are adopted.In this English-Chinese translation practice,the principles mentioned above have been applied to seek optimal relevance,realize the resonance with the cognitive context of the original author,and make the translation adapt to the cognitive context of the target readers so as to achieve communicative success.