A Report On Translation Of Lessons From Lockdown:The Educational Legacy Of COVID-19 (Excerpts)

This paper is based on a report on the translation of Lessons from Lockdown: The Educational Legacy of COVID-19.The book explores the impact of COVID-19 on schooling and the education system,reflects on what changes the COVID-19 has brought and will bring to formal education,and proposes fifty relevant recommendations.The book enables Chinese readers to gain insight into what impact the pandemic has exerted on the education system in Britain.From the perspective of context,there exists limited overlap between the mental world,social world and physical world of the author and those of the readers.One reason is that the significant differences between Britain and China,such as the way that the government responded to the virus,the attitude people held towards the lockdown policy,the guarantee of education during the outbreak and so on.Contextual adaptation is entailed to revivify the education landscape in Britain during the pandemic described in the source text and render the author’s attitude towards education issues.From the perspective of structure,for one thing,new expressions including words,phrases and slogans coined during the pandemic are not familiar to Chinese readers.For another thing,English is characterized by compactness and hypotactic sentences,while Chinese is characterized by diffusiveness and paratactic sentences.The disparity between the source language and the target language is even widened by copious long sentences in the source text.Native expressions in the translation entail structural adaptation.Investigation from two angles proposed in the adaptation theory,namely contextual correlates of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability sheds light on how to solve the problems mentioned above,and thus adaptation theory is chosen as the guiding principle to attain an accurate and fluent translation.The report is composed of five parts.Part one is the description of the translation task,demonstrating the background and significance of the translation task,the general idea and linguistic features of the source text and the social status of the author.Part two is the description of the translation process,which elaborates the preparation for the task,difficulties encountered during the translation,adopted strategies and the like.Part three is the theoretical basis,which explains the content and development of adaptation theory and analyzes its feasibility as a guiding theory.Part four analyzes representative examples in the translation process.Part five is the demonstration of lessons from translation practice and reflection on what can be improved in the future.