| Since entering the 21 st century,with the rapid development of social economy and science and technology,the realization of educational modernization has become the focus of China’s reform.In the educational reform,cultivating students’ critical thinking ability has become the top priority.However,generally speaking,most of the students in China are relatively weak in critical thinking ability.At present,the training of critical thinking ability is insufficient.Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues,introduced by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,just bridges this gap.Up to now,there is no translated version of this book,so the first chapter of Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues was selected as the source text.This translation corpus comes from the first chapter of Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues,edited by James WM.Noll,a former professor of the college of Education,University of Maryland.The first chapter is mainly through the views of John Dewey’s Experience and Education to debate with Roger Scruton’s School and Schooling.John Dewey,an American philosopher,opposed traditional schooling and suggested that education should be linked to students’ personal experience,while John Scruton,a British philosopher,represented the traditionalist view,arguing that progressive education would have a catastrophic effect on quality education.From the perspective of text type,Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues belongs to informative text.Therefore,this report is guided by Eugene,A,Nida’s functional equivalent theory,and the cases studies will be analyzed from the lexical,syntactic,textual and cultural levels.At the lexical level,combined with the context,the method of meaning selection,part of speech conversion and meaning extension were adopted to deal with difficult words.At the syntactic level,conversion of active and passive voice,inversion and division were adopted to make long and complicated sentences more acceptable.At the textual level,conjunction and substitution were adopted to make the original information clear and makes the text coherent.At the cultural level,annotation was adopted to bridge the cultural differences between China and the United States.This translation practice has not only improved the individual’s translation ability,but also deepened the understanding of Nida’s functional equivalence theory. |
