A Report On The Translation Of Educational Philosophy A History From The Ancient World To Modern America (Chapter Three)

The source text of the translation project is from the third chapter of Educational Philosophy: a History from the Ancient World to Modern America by Edward J.Power.Chapter 3,Educational Theory in the Modern World,mainly studies some influential educational philosophies and theories.The introduction of such theories can help Chinese readers better understand the development of educational philosophy in Western countries.The source text is an informative one,mainly providing readers with truth,facts,information,knowledge and opinions.The language is logical,formal,concise and plain.The source text is lexically featured by abundant proper nouns,abstract nouns,impersonal subjects,prepositions and prepositional phrases,and syntactically by frequent use of passive voice,as well as a large proportion of compound and complex sentences.The key point of the translation project is to translate proper nouns accurately,and the difficult point is to deal with complex sentences properly.The translator used Newmark’s communicative translation to handle these difficulties.Communicative translation attempts to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership.Such techniques as inversion,conversion and division were also used to make the translation idiomatic,smooth and natural.It is found that the translator’s proficiency in the source text will have a significant impact on the subsequent translation behavior,and that the translator’s assumption of the target readers will affect the expression of the target text.Communicative translation is reader-oriented,but it is a kind of undertranslation and the translation reduces the professionalism and authority of the original text to some extent.