A Report On The C-E Translation Of The Chinese Way To Happiness (Chapter 4) From The Perspective Of Text Typology

The Chinese Way to Happiness is by nature a monograph that studies ways to increase people’s well-being in contemporary China.The fourth chapter which is assigned to the translator as her Chinese-English translation project,is about 14,000 characters long that focuses on the enhancement of people’s happiness through family building and social security construction.Before she carried out the task,the translator made repeated readings of the source text and recognized it as a typical type of the “informative text” with features of “succinct use of language” and “obvious logical relations”.The translator believes that Katharina Reiss’ s “Text Typology” has a role to play in translating texts of this type.Fundamentally speaking,the theory requires the translator to reproduce the original content in the full accurate sense,and render the translated text to the norms of the target language.With the help of “Text Typology”,she adopted corresponding strategies to solve the problems at different levels.The techniques of “free translation” and“category conversion” were adopted at the lexical level to convey the original content while“subjects” were added to clarify initiators of actions at the syntactic level.To achieve the goals of “succinct use of language” and “obvious logical relations”,“omission” is employed to cut out redundant verbiages in the source text.For long complex sentences,she turned to “word order readjustment”,“sentence structure reconstruction”,and “manifestation of logical relations” to make the final version more in line with the norms in the target language.The first part of the report introduces the background and values of the project.The second part offers a clear description of preparations done before the translation activity,classification of problems encountered in the translation process,and revision and proofreading of the drafts as well.The third part discusses “Text Typology” and its prospective role of guidance in the translation of informative texts.The fourth part illustrates the theory’s application by analyzing typical cases from three aspects,namely their lexical features,syntactic structures,and cohesive means for textual compactness.The translator sums up her experience in the fifth part for a wish of providing reference to other translators in their translation practice of more informative texts.