A Translation Report On The Romans:From Village To Empire (Excerpt)

This report is based on the Chinese translation practice of Chapter Nine of The Romans: From Village to Empire under the guidance of Peter Newmark’s text typology theory.The Romans: From Village to Empire,written by Mary T.Boatwright,Daniel J.Gargola,and Richard J.A.Talbert,covers Roman historical development,including social,cultural,military and political issues.The book traces the development and evolution of Rome from the age of village to that of the monarchy and the republic,and then to the emperor’s dictatorship until the demise of the Empire.As history textbooks are typical informative texts,the translator of this thesis adopts communicative translation approach as the mainstay and semantic translation approach as the supplement.Based on Newmark’s text typology theory,the author of this thesis analyzes the original text from the lexical level,syntactical level,and textual level,with an effort to convey the accuracy of historical facts and information to the target readers in the coherent and concise description.The report is mainly divided into five chapters.Chapter one is task description,which introduces the authors of the source text,contents and characteristics of the text,as well as the reasons for the translation project.Chapter two is the description of the whole translation process,including the preparation before translation,the difficulties in translation and the revision after translation.Chapter three introduces Newmark’s text typology theory and its correlation with the translation of the source text and also introduces relevant translation strategies and methods.Chapter four is the translation analysis of the source text from the lexical,syntactic and textual levels,with an attempt to explore the instructive function of Newmark’s text typology theory in translating historical texts.Chapter five is the conclusion of the translation report,in which the author of this thesis summarizes the entire translation practice,pointing out its shortcomings and feasible suggestions for improvement,as well as the further research direction.This translation report is expected to provide referential efficacy for related translation practice of history textbooks.