A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of City Living:How Urban Dwellers And Urban Spaces Make One Another (Excerpt) From The Perspective Of Reiss’s Text Typology Theory

This translation practice report is based on the English-Chinese translation of "City Living:How Urban Dwellers and Urban Spaces Make One Another"(excerpt).The book aims to deliver the nature of city living and city dwellers to target readers and introduces the process of repurposing of cities by taking Berlin and Johannesburg as examples.It has important practical significance for people to understand the characteristics of contemporary city life,address various issues in the current urbanization so as to create better urban spaces.The main difficulties encountered by the author in the process of translation include professional terms involving multidisciplinary backgrounds,abstract and vague words and long sentences with complex syntactic structures that occur frequently.To address the above translation difficulties,this report discusses translation strategies at the lexical and syntactic levels from the perspective of Reiss’s text typology theory.Reiss classifies text types into informative,expressive,operative and audio-medial types.The source text was written with plain language,aiming to present facts and convey information to readers.Thus,the author classified the source text as an informative text.When translating this text,attention should be paid to convey its content,rather than the form.It is found that literal translation with annotation can serve as a good way to address the difficulty posed by multidisciplinary terminologies as this strategy can help readers acquire background knowledge and understand the meaning of terms,thereby reducing the difficulty of comprehension.For words with abstract meanings in the source text,adopting the strategy of specification can make abstract and general expressions clearer.As for the large number of long sentences with complex syntactic structures in the source text,the strategy of restructuring and conversion can free the translation from the linguistic form of English and make it consistent with the expression habits of Chinese,thus increasing the fluency and readability of the translation.It is found that Reiss’s text typology theory can provide a theoretical basis for translators to analyze text types and select appropriate translation strategies.In the meanwhile,this report also points out the findings and limitations in this translation practice,hoping to offer reference for future translation of informative texts.