A Report On E-C Translation Of Philosophical Posthumanism（Part One）

This is a report on English-Chinese translation of Francesca Ferrando’s Philosophical Posthumanism（part one）,which is published in 2019.The book offers a comprehensive overview of different schools of thought about posthumanism and transhumanism,so as to develop a lucid picture of what philosophical posthumanism is and discuss the future of humans,which provides certain reference to philosophers in this field.In this task-based part,Ferrando outlines a genealogy of philosophical posthumanism and compares different currents on their origins,agendas,and stances.With the development of bio-technology and de-centralization of anthropology,the notion of human is in need of an urgent redefinition.Philosophical Posthumanism is a response to the human crisis,which provides us with an inclusive perspective to investigate the world we encountered.As the source text is a philosophical text,its language is featured with generalization,abstractness,logicality and conscientiousness.The specific linguistic features are mainly as follows: nominalization,polysemous words,long and complicated sentences,implied logical relationships,as well as ambiguous references,all of which may pose unexpected challenges to the translator.The main function of the source text lies in information delivery.Thus in order to faithfully convey the original information,the translator adopts functional equivalence theory proposed by Eugene Nida as the guiding theory of this translation project.According to Nida,the primary aim of translating must be “reproducing the message” with the closest and most natural equivalents.Only in this way could target readers have an accurate comprehension and appreciation of the target text as the original readers do.With the guidance of the theory,this report is elaborated at lexical,syntactic and textual levels.Concrete cases are listed to demonstrate the guidance and validity of the theory into practice.Through practice,functional equivalence theory to some extent proves to be effective in translating philosophical texts,since it offers specific approaches to the translator in resolving translation difficulties.With regard to lexical equivalence,several translation methods are flexibly employed including conversion of word classes,discrimination of polysemous words and adoption of Chinese four-character words.In terms of syntactic equivalence,the corresponding methods are reconstructing kernel sentences,voice transformation and word order conversion.Concerning textual equivalence,explicitation of invisible logic and disambiguation of references are two primary methods adopted to ensure logic and semantic coherence.In summary,consisting of five chapters,this report is aimed to summarize the main characteristics of philosophical texts and propose translation methods with concrete cases under the guidance of functional equivalence theory.For one thing,it is hoped that this translation project can enhance academic exchanges and help Chinese readers to further think about human beings and their future evolution.For another,it is expected that the humble insights summarized above in this report could serve as a reference available for more translators working on translating English philosophical texts.