An E-C Translation Report On The Decadent Society（Excerpts） From The Perspective Of Social Semiotics

The practical materials of this report are taken from The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success,written by Ross Douthat in 2020.The book carries the detailed analysis of the desperate plight of the contemporary order in the United States.As social science literature texts,The Decadent Society has involves a large number of terminologies and long and complex sentences,with rigorous structure,strong logic and lively cultural color.In the process of translation,with the purpose of transmitting the original message as faithfully as possible,the author chooses to adopt the “social semiotics” of Charles Morris,an American semanticist and one of the founders of modern semiotics,to guide the translation practice.Semiotics as a science makes use of special signs to state facts about signs,studying things or the properties of things in their function of serving as signs.In his book Foundations of The Theory of Signs published in 1938,Charles Morris clearly put forward three categories of semiotics: semantics,syntactics and pragmatics for the first time.Morris advocated the combination of the study of language signs with human activities and social meaning.Morris’ s social semiotics emphasizes the consideration of the specific rules for the use of words and sentences,as well as the conditions for the use of language signs.This theory takes notice to both the micro and macro elements of the text,which can guide the translation practice from different dimensions.On the basis of Morris’ s social semiotics,this report analyzes and discusses from the semantical,syntactical and pragmatical dimensions of semiosis by the means of case analysis.In the semantical dimension of semiosis,the literal translation method is used to deal with terminologies while the free translation method is used to deal with culture-loaded expressions.In the syntactical dimension of semiosis,the author makes the parenthesis as supplement into a separate sentence,treats the short attributive clauses as prepositional modifier and the long attributive clauses as independent sentences,and adopts the comprehensive method to translate the long and difficult sentences featured by complex components.In the pragmatical dimension of semiosis,explicitation is taken to realize contextual adaptability,and annotation is adapted to achieve communicative consideration and flexible wording is used to reach logical coherence.Through this translation practice,the author finds that Morris’ s social semiotics theory has a practical guiding effect on the translation practice of social science literature,especially those texts with refined language,as the theoretical support for the processing of microstructure such as vocabulary and sentence and macrostructure level such as context and communication.