A Report On The Translation Of The Strange Order Of Things(Chapter One-Two)

This is a translation report.The source text is excerpted from the first and the second chapter of The Strange Order of Things,which is a new book written by Antonio Damasio,the professor of neurology,psychology,and philosophy.The book begins with a study of why and how we feel all the world,express feelings,and build ourselves by using our feelings and how the brain interacts with the body to support these functions.This book is both scientific and rigorous,which also brings the humane care.It opens a new direction for people to study psychology,and studies the important role of “feeling” from a scientific perspective.The original text is written in clear and precise words,and the source text belongs to informative text.So faithfulness should be firstly observed.In order to accurately convey the concept of psychology to readers,a clear understanding of the concept should be noticed,especially the way in which the author defines a concept.Therefore the author decided to choose the theory of functional equivalence.“Functional equivalence” was proposed by Eugene Nida.(Eugene Nida 2001:30)The so-called “functional equivalence” means that translation does not refer to the rigid correspondence of words,but to the functional equivalence between the two languages.He believed that “translation is the reappearance of the source language from semantics to stylistics in the most appropriate,natural and equivalent language.” Nida proposed that dynamic equivalence including lexical equivalence,syntactic equivalence,textual equivalence,and stylistic equivalence.Based on Eugene Nida’s theory of functional equivalence,this thesis analyzes typical cases in the first chapter and the second chapter of The Strange Order of Things at the lexical level,the syntactic level,and the textual level,discussing the difficult keys,and putting emphasis on using translation strategies to convey the source text.This thesis is divided into four parts.The first part mainly introduces the translating task.The second part is about the translation process.In this part,the translator introduces the preparatory work before translation,the translation theory effecting on the translation practice and the draft translating and its modification.The third part analyses strategies and methods of translation with examples.Finally,the author describes some experience in the translation practice and expresses the hopes that the experience will benefit to the translation practice in future.