A Translation Report Of Population Policy And The U.S. Constitution(Excerpts)

This translation project is adapted from Population Policy and the U.S.Constitution written by Larry D. Barnett. The source text is said to be the first in-depthdemography work on the interrelationship of population and law in the United States.It covers a wide range of knowledge, including demography, economics, laws and soon. The population problem is one of global main social problems, and it is also thecore of many contemporary social problems. According to network and librarysearching, there is no Chinese version yet. In China, the population problem is one ofthe most serious problem, which has long plagued China’s economy and society. Thepolicy and legislation have lagged behind the movement and changes of population.This translation project may be used for the domestic scholars to understand theforeign scholars’ achievements in this field. The chapter three to chapter five has beenselected in this translation project, which mainly discuss the relationship betweenpopulation growth and the right of privacy, constitutional law and “the Tragedy of thecommons” as well as legal protection and female employment, amounting to10,000words.As a professional book on demography, the book has specific characteristics inwords, syntactics and semantics. Firstly, at the words level, legal terminologies andexpressions are abundant in the source text. Therefore, the translator translates themaccurately and flexibly so as to convey the correct meaning of source text as well as tointroduce American culture to target readers. Secondly, at the syntactic level,widespread use of long and complex sentences with few connectives, whose patternsare single, can be found in the source text. In order to grasp and recreate the content and style of the source text, the translator frequently uses approaches such as division,syntactic linearity, and rearrangement to make the language concise and plain; Inaddition, influenced by history, culture etc, English and Chinese differ in many ways,such as expression of negative and positive sentences, passive voice. Thus, thetranslator should make conversion in line with the linguistic and cultural customs oftarget language.This translation concludes the main features of professional works, including thefeatures on words, syntactic structure and expression. Based on these, the translatoradopts some methods and strategies. This translation project can help domesticscholars to understand American population policy better; meanwhile, this reportprovides some suggestions on the translation of texts with similar features.