A Report On E-C Translation Of Thinking Freedom In Africa:Towards A Theory Of Emancipatory Politics (Excerpts)

Thinking Freedom in Africa: Towards a Theory of Emancipatory Politics is a typical English philosophical monograph covering the area of African emancipatory politics,which is academically valuable.The source text is featured with abundant use of substitutes,semantic compression and expansion,logically cohesive structures,intricate sentences,philosophical terminologies,loan words,and phrases with implicit information.When translating them into Chinese,the translator must accurately convey the information of the original text and restore the philosophical characteristics of the original text.This translation practice is carried out under the guidance of Chesterman’s translation norm theory,which has a relatively complete system and mainly consists of two types of norms: the first is the expectancy norms that affect the translation product and emphasize that translators need to conform to the expectation of the target text readers under the governing of the parallel texts;the second is the professional norms that affect the translation behavior,which further consists of the accountability norm,the communication norm and the relation norm.The accountability norm requires that the target text should appropriately conform to the commissioner and translators’ standards for fidelity.The communication norm highlights translators’ role as communicators,and requires that the readability of the target text must be ensured.The relation norm is a linguistic norm that concerns the relationship of the two languages and the two texts,and requires that appropriate similarity between the source text and the target text should be maintained and established.Under these four norms,Chesterman provides three dimensions of strategies for translators,namely semantic,syntactic and pragmatic strategies.Chesterman’s theory of translation norms not only provides the translator with theoretical guidance,but the translation strategies compiled by him also provide the translator with a number of methods that help her solve various problems encountered in the translation process.In this report,the translator summarizes how methods under these three types of strategies are adopted in this translation practice to meet the translation requirements:semantically,the methods of cohesion change and distribution change are applied to make the translation more coherent so as to achieve the standard of contextual coherence in the target text;syntactically,the methods of amplification,sentence structure change and clause structure change are used to make sure that the target text is in line with the clear and concise features of philosophical texts in expression;pragmatically,translation methods of tentative translation and visibility change are utilized to ensure the accuracy of the translation.And the translator also adopts the method of explicitness change to clarify implicit expressions in the source text,so that the readers can better understand the hidden information conveyed by the author.It is hoped that this translation report will serve as a reference for translators who will carry out translation of philosophical texts.