Contemporary Graduate English (Translation Tutorial)

Author: Guo Haoru
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-09-01
Features:
★★ "Contemporary Graduate English" is a pioneering textbook designed for the new century. This series is a brand-new graduate English textbook developed based on the latest "Graduate English Syllabus."
★★ This textbook is tailored to the current trends in graduate English teaching, the learning patterns and characteristics of graduate English learners, and is compiled with principles such as "novelty," "practicality," and "alignment with English certification exams."
★★ Committed to "excellence," the series is meticulously designed, selected, and written, aiming to ensure that the material is suitable for teaching and beneficial for learning.
★★ This series includes volumes such as "Reading and Writing," "Translation," "Listening and Speaking," "Viewing and Learning," and "Self-Study Reader," accompanied by teaching guides, audio cassettes, video cassettes, and CDs to meet the needs of modern English teaching.
"The Translation Textbook" is an intermediate English translation course focusing primarily on English-to-Chinese translation while also covering Chinese-to-English translation. It is an essential part of the "Contemporary Graduate English" series. The textbook consists of 11 chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction, providing a general overview of the entire book. The following chapters introduce various issues and coping skills in translation from vocabulary, grammar, paragraph structure, and textual coherence to rhetoric, progressing from simple to advanced levels. Each chapter's material is sufficient for 4 class hours, and studying the entire book requires 36–40 hours, though teachers can adjust the content based on student levels and available class time. The goal of this textbook is to cultivate graduate students' translation skills. The target audience is graduate students with a College English Test Band 4 (CET-4) level or higher, but it can also be used by other English learners of similar proficiency to improve their translation abilities. Translation broadly involves reading and understanding the source text and expressing it in the target language. This book covers both aspects, but the focus is on reading and understanding the source text, as correct comprehension is the foundation of all translation techniques. Therefore, studying this textbook can also significantly enhance students' reading comprehension skills. The main features of this textbook are as follows:
1. Reflects new approaches in translation research. The book adopts a structure of word-sentence-paragraph-text and genre, starting with explanations of word understanding, semantic differentiation, sentence components, and sentence adjustments, then discussing inter-sentence relationships from a textual analysis perspective, using lexical and logical links for connection, and concluding with translations of texts in different genres. This arrangement breaks the limitation of explaining translation solely from a sentence perspective and includes translation in specific situational and cultural contexts, reflecting new approaches in translation research.
2. Theory closely integrated with practice. The purpose of learning translation theory and techniques is to apply them in translation. Therefore, this book explains translation theory and techniques concisely, using minimal technical terms, illustrating points with examples, and guiding practice with the learned theories and techniques. We believe this is the best method for learning translation.
3. Examples cover a wide range and are fresh and relevant. To suit graduate students from various disciplines such as science, engineering, medicine, agriculture, law, and economics, this book selects a large number of examples, paragraphs, and full articles from English-language books, newspapers, and magazines. These texts are up-to-date yet not overly specialized, meeting both linguistic and content needs for graduate students.
4. Detailed explanations and self-study-friendly. The examples are explained in a question-based format to stimulate active thinking. Occasionally, incorrect translations and analyses are provided for comparison. All examples include reference translations for self-study.
5. Moderate difficulty level, beneficial for improving translation skills. The authors have long been engaged in teaching College English and graduate English, deeply understanding student levels and needs. The book starts from a CET-4 level and progresses gradually, making it suitable for improving students' reading comprehension and translation skills.