A Report On E-C Translation Of A Concise Survey Of Western Civilization (Chapter Ⅱ)

This translation practice report is based on the English-Chinese translation of Chapter Two of A Concise Survey of Western Civilization: Supremacies and Diversities throughout History by Brian A.Pavlac,and adopts Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory as the guiding principle.The objective of this report is to find out the translation strategies and methods involved in achieving the “most natural” and the “closest” Chinese expressions to the English source text.In this report,investigations on the equivalence at the lexical level,syntactic level,and textual level in historical translation are conducted respectively,and afore-mentioned translation aspects are discussed under the guiding principle of Functional Equivalence Theory.This report consists of five chapters.Chapter One is the task description,focusing on the background and the requirements of the task,and the characteristics of the source text as a historical one.Chapter Two describes the translation process,including pre-translation preparations,the actual process of translating and post-translation proofreading and revision.Chapter Three introduces the theory of functional equivalence and its application to the translation of historical texts.Chapter Four is a case study,the main body of the report,which consists of three sections.Section One deals with the cases at the lexical level,analyzing examples of the application of addition and conversion of part of speech,followed by examples of proper nouns translation.Section Two discusses cases of the syntactic aspects,from the perspectives of long and difficult sentence splitting and morphological conversion respectively.Section Three analyses the realization of coherence and logic of the text through the use of cohesive devices and reconstruction of sentence order.Chapter Five concludes with a summary and evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the translation practice,its practical significance and application value,hoping to provide some reference for future translation of historical texts.