A Report On The E-C Translation Of Pakistan-Social And Cultural Transformations In A Muslim Nation (Excerpts)

The source text is excerpted from “Pakistan: Social and Cultural Transformations in a Muslim Nation” written by Mohammad Abdul Qadeer,Professor Emeritus at the School of Urban and Regional Planning,Queen’s University,Canada.The book is the first one that explains in English the evolution of Pakistan’s social system and cultural patterns from the perspective of social history.It explores the relationship between Pakistan’s social organizations and its culture as well as that among political development,economics and ideology.The translation tells the research trend on Pakistan studies overseas and provides domestic scholars new perspectives and ideas to study Pakistan.It will help Chinese investors overcome the cross-cultural differences and promote the healthy development of enterprises.It will also help Chinese people raise the risk awareness and recognize the ideological differences so as to improve cultural inclusiveness and public opinion.After online verification,it is confirmed that there is no Chinese version of the book so far.Thus,based on the requirements of translation task,the translator chooses the preface and the first chapter of the book as translation materials,with a total of 10,317 words.The book is a historical text which focuses on historical facts and incorporates the author’s views.Based on the data from Word Smith(7.0),the translator concludes that the source text uses refined words and long sentences,and is rich in content with difficulties in cross-communication,which accords with the features of historical text.In the translation process,cultural differences is the major difficulty to accurately understand the ST.At the same time,polysemy,structural ambiguity and contextual information increase the translation difficulty.Moreover,how to use the precise words,transfer the ST style and avoid Euro-Chinese,tests the translator’s translation ability.In view of the above translation difficulties and based on the translation purposes,the translator adopts foreignization as the main strategy and literal translation and annotation as the main translation method.To faithfully convey the information,reproduce the author’s intention and meet the needs of target readers,the translator chooses the CEA framework as the analysis framework to elaborate and analyze the translation difficulties from the three aspects of "comprehension,expression and adaptation".The case study focuses on the problem-solving thinking process,translation techniques employed and search tools used.As for comprehension,the translator accurately understand the language details and its content based on online verification,grammatical analysis and contextual information.In terms of expression,the translator emphasizes the faithful conveyance of information and conformity with the narrative style of written Chinese.As for adaptation,the translator explores how to break the cohesion of the ST and reconnect it with Chinese thinking modes so as to achieve cultural communication and bring better reading experience to the readers.