Areport On The English-Chinese Translation Of Cultural Politics Of Translation:East Africa In A Global Context(Chapter Five)

The selected materials for this translation practice report are from Chapter 5 “Translating the Law: Reflections of a Linguistic Activist” of Cultural Politics of Translation: East Africa in a Global Context.This chapter is mainly in the form of an interview with Njogu,which focuses on Swahili and the process of constitutional development in Africa.Through a systematic description of the evolution of East African constitutions,it provides experience and reference for people’s constitutional translation research,allowing people to further explore the cultural blueprint behind African constitutional translation while understanding Swahili,which has reference significance for the development and research of Sino African relations.The translator analyses the textual characteristics of the source text and concludes that the source text is informative and is primarily concerned with conveying information.Newmark advocates that informational texts are suitable for communicative translation,and the translator therefore uses communicative translation as a guide in order to convey the message effectively.The difficulties in this translation practice are mainly related to the lexical,syntactic and textual levels.The difficulties at the lexical level are mainly related to the translation of proper nouns,abstract nouns and culture-loaded words.The syntactic difficulties are mainly related to the translation of passive sentences,complicated sentences and impersonal-subject sentences.Therefore,guided by communicative translation,the translator adopts the methods of literal translation and transliteration to deal with proper nouns,and the translation of abstract nouns through the translation methods of converting part of speech and amplification by supplying category words to ensure the communicative function of the source text.At the textual level,the translator uses communicative translation as a guide to achieve cohesion and coherence throughout the text.Through the application of these translation methods and strategies,the translator strives to convey the complete message of the source text while making the language style of the translated text conform to the cognitive habits of the target language readers as far as possible,so as to better achieve the communicative purpose.