A Report On The E-C Translation Of Between Psychology And Philosophy:East-West Themes And Beyond(Excerpts)Guided By Communicative Translation Theory

Philosophy,the science of science,provides a new way of thinking for people with its dialectical thinking and profound wisdom.Currently,developing emerging and interdisciplinary subjects is of far-reaching significance for the prosperity of China’s philosophy and social sciences.Against this backdrop,the translation of philosophical texts has been of growing significance.Appendix B and Appendix C of Professor Slote’s monograph Between Psychology and Philosophy: East-West Themes and Beyond are selected as the translation material and Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory is adopted as the guiding theory to solve the lexical,syntactic and contextual problems encountered in the translation process.Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory is applicable to informative text into which the source text selected from an academic paper falls.Communicative translation,being target-reader-oriented,is aimed at accurately and objectively conveying the information of the source text in a manner consistent with the expression habits of the target readers,so as to reproduce in the target readers the same effect felt by the original readers.Guided by Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory,the translator proposes the following solutions to the translation problems brought about by nominalization,attributive clauses,compound complex sentences and pronoun reference.At the lexical level,verbalization of nouns and of adjectives,by avoiding redundancy of the sentence,renders the translated text more concise.At the syntactic level,some attributive clauses are translated into adverbial clauses,thereby making the clauses of the target text more logically-related.In addition,by division and restructuring of sense groups,long English sentences are divided into short ones,which are then rearranged according to their logical order,so as to make the target text more accurate and explicit.At the contextual level,the ambiguity of pronoun references in the source text is avoided by superordinates for hyponyms and adoption of repetition.The report summarizes the problems encountered in the translation practice and proposes solutions to each problem as an attempt to benefit E-C translators of philosophical texts.