Translation Techniques For Clauses In Social Science Text From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression Patterns

Workplace learning has become a necessary condition for teachers to achieve professional development and promote educational innovation.The book Individual,School,and National Factors Impacting Teachers’ Workplace Learning explores multiple factors that affect teachers’ workplace learning from a professional perspective.It aims to help readers understand relevant information about teachers’ professional development,establish an institutional system to promote teachers’ learning motivation,and ensure the further advancement of education reform.The book is worth translating because it can provide certain reference for the development of teachers and education in China.The source text of this translation practice is the third part of this book.In this part,the author of the book adopted ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods to collect and analyze information about different schools.The source text is a typical social science text,including both complex clauses introducing educational phenomena and loosely connected dialogues of the interviews.In addition,a variety of speakers and references are involved and the topics are changeable.Two major challenges will be encountered in the translation process: the understanding of information structures of the clauses and the achievement of cohesion between clauses.Therefore,the main purpose of this report is to explore how to figure out information structures in the source text and how to retain or reconstruct appropriate thematic progression patterns to make sure the clauses are coherently combined in the target text.This report consists of five chapters.Chapter One introduces the source text and the significance of this translation practice.Chapter Two describes the translation process.Chapter Three provides the theoretical framework,in which theme-rheme theory is introduced,thematic progression patterns are expounded,and the English thematic progression patterns are compared with the Chinese ones.In Chapter Four,the translation cases to deal with four basic thematic progression patterns are analyzed.Translation techniques for retaining or reconstructing the original thematic progression patterns in the target text are explored.Four methods are adopted to reconstruct the thematic progression patterns: indicating topic theme,adjusting word order,recasting and cutting theme-rheme structures.Chapter Five is a summary of the findings and limitations of this report.