Chapter TwoPROCESS DESCRIPTION
2.1 Pre-translation Preparations
The selected source text is about grammar, as a usual field whose background has already been known by students, a different strategy of pre-translation preparation will be taken and that is quite distinct from the text types of culture or history, which is before translating, the source text is read over to gain the main content and stylistic features. The grammar source text here just needs roughly translating the moment the source text is accessed to get an outline of the source text.
2.1.1 Analysis of features of the source text
The linguistic features of the source text must be analyzed first to make sure what kind of translation techniques or skills can be utilized correctly during the translation.
In term of the lexical feature, there is plenty of grammar terminologies, such as “positive polarity”, “confirmatory tags”, “auxiliary verb”, “polar question” and so on. Thus, the parallel text comes in handy. Besides that, polysemy occurs seldomly. This is the characteristic of the vocabulary.
As for the syntactic feature, the proportion of short clauses in the source text is large; accordingly, restructuring is needed in many places. There are also a few long and complex sentences. To make them clear, division and reinventing sentence structures are good choices. The passive voice occurs frequently, and most of it had better be translated into active voice.
At the mention of the textual feature, there are many references and conjunctions in the text to keep the logical relations clear. And there is also a lot of redundancy in the source text, thus we use the cohesive device of omission to avoid redundancy when translating.
In the matter of style, the language in the ST is accessible and those analyses defended are engaging, more briefly and in an informal style.
2.2 The Procedure of the Translation
After the preparatory work, the formal translation stage starts. In the case that the chapters selected have gone through a rough translation, those confusing sentences and pieces of knowledge have been spotted. Based on an overview of the content of the whole chapters and a brief understanding of the source text, the theme of the ambiguous sentence can be inferred from the context and it reduces the difficulty of translation. In terms of these bits of translation difficulties, parallel texts in either English or Chinese help the translator select the correct and accurate translation. The specific cases will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
Translation of high quality must come from repeated modifications and corrections. Thus, a translation should never be considered completed after a single pass. It needs thorough checking and revision to ensure nothing has been left out and misunderstood. A proper and qual
