A Translation Project Report Of CITIES AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING: Planning,Design And Policy Nexus(Section 8)

The material for this translation project is excerpted from CITIES AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING: Planning,Design and Policy Nexus,edited by Canadian scholar Sasha Tsenkova.With an eye toward using the relationship between planning,design,and policy to achieve a human-centered approach,the book is a collection of research papers published by contemporary Western scholars on affordable housing transformation,using a comparative approach to explore the future of urban housing and planning policies.This book consists of five chapters and twenty sections,with case studies of twelve cities in eight countries,including European countries,Canada and the United States.The author chooses the eighth section of the book for translation practice.Using the mixedincome public housing transformation projects in the cities of San Francisco and Washington,D.C.as examples,this section uses comparative analysis to explore the efforts of the two cities in promoting community equity and inclusion,exposing the phenomena of serious social inequality and racial discrimination.Based on Eugene A.Nida’s functional equivalence,the author tries to analyze the ways to achieve functional equivalence on the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.At the lexical level,the difficulties are mostly the names of government agencies and policies and other proper nouns.The translator needs to consult relevant background information extensively and use transliteration,literal translation and free translation.At the syntactic level,long and complicated sentences are difficult to deal with.The translator needs to break it down,figure out what the modifier modifies and reassemble the sentence.At the level of discourse,as the original text is academic in nature with close-knit context,rigorous logic and repetitive statements,the translator needs to have a macro grasp of the full text and flexibly apply the method of addition and subtraction to ensure consistency and coherence.At the same time,it is necessary to pay attention to the language style of the text and choose the appropriate style of words corresponding to the original text.After this translation practice,the author realized that language competence is key to translation quality.A rigorous attitude and extensive use of references are required in translation.Post-editing is one of the basic skills of a translator,who should also accept advice from others and insist on the combination of self-correction and cross-examination.Finally,it is hoped that this translation project report can contribute to the cause of anti-racism,raise the awareness of the society to the underprivileged.