A Report On Translation Of Dashes In The Sociologist’s Eye (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation

The material selected for this translation practice report is excerpted from chapter five of The Sociologist’s Eye,written by Kai Erikson,an American sociologist.The book offers the thinking of how sociology became a field of study and how it shifted its attention to new fields of study over time,presenting the reader with a new way for sociologists to think about human culture and social life.One of the significant features of the social science work is its frequently used dashes,which brings great challenges to the translation.Though both English and Chinese use dashes in the text,and there are similarities in usage,for example,to set off annotation or supplement,to mark the parenthesis,to mark the summary of the previous text or to indicate the following text,to mark the abrupt change,and to mark the author or source after the quotation,they are two completely different languages.There are still differences in the use of dashes.Moreover,English uses dashes much more frequently than Chinese.Therefore,the dashes of the original text cannot be simply copied into the translation.In view of the fact that social science books belong to informative texts,the translation activities of these texts can be guided by Peter Newmark’s Communicative Translation.At present,there are a few articles studying the translation of dashes in English social science texts,but only a few of them use Communicative Translation theory as the theoretical guidance.Therefore,the translator of this thesis takes Communicative Translation as the theoretical guidance for this translation practice.The translator discusses the ways in which he attempts to translate dashes in social science texts from the perspective of Communicative Translation,and summarizes three translation strategies: retaining dashes,replacing dashes by commas,periods,colons or brackets,and deleting dashes with dozens of case analysis,in the hope of providing references for the translation of dashes in similar texts.