A Report On The Translation Of Critical Thinking

Tracy Bowell, the associate dean of school of social science at the University of Waikato, New Zealand and Gary Kemp, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, UK., published the book Critical Thinking with the subtitle as A Concise Guide. It is an authoritative work in the field of argumentation logic. While many advanced examinations overseas such as GRE and SAT focus on the critical thinking level, domestically the study in this area is still not developed even though our educational institutions has started to attach more importance to such capability of Chinese students. Therefore, the primary purpose of this translation is aiming at introducing basic concepts of critical thinking to Chinese students in hope of assisting at their further study. More important, by the translation, some techniques and translation theory could be applied to concrete practices.On the basis of the translation and the reflections of the whole process, some experience and insightful thought were reported in this paper. It focused on the problems encountered in the translation and listed several methods used to solve the problems. The theoretical framework is the functional equivalence theory proposed by Eugene Nida. In coping with the detailed problems the strategies to terminology, division and omission on sentence and paragraph level were in the central discussion. In addition, some cultural differences were briefly covered.The main content of this translation report is divided into three parts:Chapter One is description of the original text. In this part, a brief introduction about the author and the work are given, including the writing style and the significance of this translation.Chapter Two concerns about process description. This chapter described each step of translating this book. The whole process consists of three phases: pre-translation or preparation, execution or translation process and finalization or review and proofreading.Chapter Three consists of case analyses of translation. In this section, two subjects are mainly analyzed, namely, the translation of terminology and the translation strategy to division,omission and amplification. In addition, the main translation theory is involved in specific case study.