A Report On The Translation Of A New World Begins: The History Of The French Revolution(Chapters 3-5)

This translation practice report conducted an English-Chinese translation of Jeremy D.Popkin’s A New World Begins: the History of the French Revolution(Chapter 3-5).It describes the scene of the “sunset afterglow” of the Bourbon Dynasty and the fundamental reasons for the French Revolution.It also describes the period when the Bourbon Dynasty would doom,and the emerging republic will be victorious.As a historical text,the book has the styles of objectivity,professionalism and preciseness.On the lexical level,the text contains a large number of historical terminologies and words of historical connotation thus the difficulties lie in understanding the terms;On the syntactic level,the text contains a large number of parentheses and non-finite clauses;hence thorough understanding of the original text is important;On the discourse level,there exist a difficulty of achieving cohesion and coherence;On the stylistic level,the difficulties lie in reproducing the original style.Under the guidance of Eugene Nida’s theory of Functional Equivalence,the author uses translation techniques such as annotation,semantic extension,amplification,and passive voice to active voice respectively to achieve the same understanding between the target language readers and the source language readers and the equivalence on the four levels.Through this translation practice,the author realizes that translators should take the understanding and reaction of the target language readers as the top priority.There have been many translations describing the French Revolution in the literary field,many of which are masterpieces,but the author still hopes to contribute a little to the dissemination of this history.