A Practice Report On E-C Translation Of A Brief History Of Great Britain(Chapter One)

With the development of globalization and the increasingly frequent exchanges among countries,having a basic knowledge of the history of different countries is becoming more and more important in this day and age.Through the study of a country’s history,people can not only gain insight into the cultural and social conditions of that country,but also take the best and remove the worst from it for their own continuous development.Historical texts are one of the most important media for documenting and reflecting the history of a country.A Brief History of Great Britain is written by William E.Burns,a famous American professor of history.This book mainly introduces the major historical events that took place in Great Britain from prehistory to the beginning of the twenty-first century,and provides an authentic account of some historical figures.This translation practice takes the first chapter of A Brief History of Great Britain as the research material.The first chapter mainly covers the history of Great Britain from prehistory to about 450 A.D.,which includes the information about the early inhabitants,the Roman Conquest,the rise of religion,etc.Guided by the theory of Reiss’ s text typology,the author defines the text type and analyzes the characteristics of the text to be translated.The author adopts the case study method to explore the translation skills and techniques of the historical text at three levels: lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.At the lexical level,the author verifies the translation of a series of proper nouns related to historical figures,places and events that appear in the text,and at the same time makes an in-depth study of lexical translation from the perspectives of conversion of word class,polysemy,and extension of word meaning.At the syntactic level,taking into account the differences between the Chinese and English language structures,the author adopts the different translation strategies and techniques,such as division,voice conversion and syntactic linearity,based on the characteristics of the historical text.At the textual level,the author takes cohesion and coherence as the main research objects,and focuses on how to realize them in the translation.Through this translation practice,the author has had a deeper understanding of the characteristics of historical texts and learned more about the application of Reiss’ s text typology theory.The author hopes that this translation practice can not only help improve the author’s translation competence,but also provide a reference value to the future translation research of historical texts.