Social Science Text Between Capitalism And Community (Excerpt) English-Chinese Translation Practice Repor

The source text of this translation practice is taken from the social science text Between Capital and Community,written by Michael Lebowitz,a Canadian political economist.The translator chose Chapters 8 and 9 of the book as the source text,which mainly discusses the atomism within capitalism and the struggle between the two organic systems of capitalism and community.The selected text contains a large number of terminology in the field of social science and the quotations of scholars in this field,and the language is formal and objective,academic and highly persuasive,and yet still vivid and easy to understand in the discussion of relevant issues thanks to the employment of some metaphoric expressions.This translation practice is guided by Functional Equivalence Theory.Functional equivalence is the“closest natural equivalence”,which emphasizes that the translation should be natural,and that the readers understand the message of the source text in the cultural context of the target language,and produces similar response as the source text readers do.According to the Functional Equivalence Theory,this translation report analyzes how the translator strove to achieve functional equivalence:in the translation of words,the translator added explanations and footnotes to conform to the decoding ability of the target readers and selected words’meanings according to the context,so as to conform to the context of the particular message;in the translation of sentences,conversion,division and inversion are mainly adopted to achieve fluency and naturalness;in the translation of discourse,the translator adopted the cohesive devices that conforms to the expression ways of the target language to ensure the naturalness of translation,and reproduced the style to ensure the similar readers’response.In short,while accurately conveying the information of the source text,the translation is natural and conforms to the expression ways of the target language;together with the retention of the source text style,the target text may achieve“the closest natural equivalence”to the source text as far as possible.