A Report On The E-C Translation Of Urban Awakenings (Excerpts) Under The Guidance Of Chesterman’s Translation Norm Theory

This report is based on the translation practice of the five chapters selected from Urban Awakenings:Disturbance and Enchantment in the Industrial City,coauthored by Brendan Gleeson and Samuel Alexander.The source text is a typical social science work,which deals with how Covid-19 changes the relationship between humans and the city,exploring the city’s enchantments and disturbances by employing the research method of sociology.With complex sentences and specialized terms,it extensively quotes different texts ranging from classical literary works to current social policies and regulations in Australia,which entails the translator’s effective interpretation under the specific social,historical,and cultural contexts in the source language culture.In addition,various rhetorical techniques,such as parallelism,metaphor and intertextuality are involved,which also adds to the difficulty of translation.To deal with these translation problems,the author resorts to Andrew Chesterman’s norm theory during the translation practice.In Chesterman’s view,expectancy norms and professional norms are basic translation guidelines.Under the general principle,semantic,syntactic and pragmatic strategies,together with corresponding translation techniques,are proposed by Chesterman in order to fulfill the translation norms.This report is conducted under the theoretical framework mentioned above.The translator applies various translation techniques such as unit shift,cultural filtering and emphasis change during the practice so as to provide a clear,understandable,and credible target text.Through this translation practice,the translator not only has accumulated translation experience of social science texts,but also has mastered the fundamental theories of urban sociology.This report can provide reference cases for the translation of similar texts.