A Report On E-C Translation Of Language,Cognition,and Human Nature(Excerpts)

The report is based on this translation practice.This practice is the literature translation of a project(the project name is Ontological Conflict between Transcendence and Experience-A Research on Linguistic Philosophy of Generative School and Cognitive School,“13th Five-Year” of Social Science Planning Project of Sichuan Province in 2019).The literature is selected from the book Language,Cognition,and Human Nature by Stephen Pinker.This translation practice focuses on the first chapter-“Formal Models of Language Learning”.The source language is English,and the number of words is about 31,000.Language,Cognition,and Human Nature includes 13 classic papers,which focuses on important contributions made by Steven Pinker to the field of cognitive science.The first chapter is a research paper on language learning models.It summarizes the existing language acquisition models at that time and finds that each model has different requirements.Based on the existing models and theories,Steven Pinker puts forward his own theory on language learning.The translation practice task was large and specialized.The language expression of the academic paper is clear and contains a large number of specialized terms,acronyms and theoretical models.Based on this,the author should focus on the accuracy of terminology translation,the consistency of translation style with the source text,and the logical conformity of the translation with the source text when translating.In order to solve these problems,the author read a large number of relevant books and texts in the pre-translation period to understand Pinker’s early works and his views.In addition,I read the pre-project literature and used computer translation assistance software(CAT)to build a relevant terminology database and corpus to assist this translation.During the translation process,the author used Nida’s functional equivalence theory as a guide and applied its translation strategy to this translation.The theory pays more attention to readers’ response.Informative text requires readers to understand the content accurately,so the translation should be highly equivalent to the source text.In the process of translation,the translator follows several key principles of the theory:(1)conveying the meaning of the source text accurately;(2)conveying the style and connotation of the source text accurately;(3)providing native and fluent expressions;(4)enabling the receivers of the information in the two languages to have similar responses and adopting appropriate translation strategies from three aspects,namely,lexical,syntactic and textual,according to the characteristics of the source text,and conduct case studies of applicability.For lexical equivalence,the translator adopts the translation methods of literal translation and reference to parallel texts;for syntactic equivalence,the translator adopts conversion,addition,division and inversion;for textual equivalence,the translator is guided by textual coherence and cohesion.