A Report On The E-C Translation Of A History Of Political Thought From Ancient Greece To Early Christianity(Chapter Ⅳ)

This is a report on the practice of English-Chinese translation of the fourth Chapter,“Aristotle”,of Janet Coleman’s A History of Political Thought From Ancient Greece to Early Christianity as the source text.In this chapter,the original author first briefly describes Aristotle’s experiences,and then lays great emphasis on his thoughts in natural philosophy,logics,moral philosophy,politics and so on.Under the guidance of Thick Translation theory proposed by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Peter Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation,the translator tries to solve difficulties in translation practice.These difficulties at the lexical level is the translation of proper nouns and common words;at the syntactic level,it is manifested as the translation of long and complex sentences,passive voice and parallel sentences;At the discourse level,it is manifested as how to reflect the cohesion and coherence in the source language.The translator selects some cases respectively from the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels for analysis to show how the translator uses specific translation skills to solve translation difficulties,achieve translation accuracy and better readership.By summarizing this translation practice,the translator comes to the following conclusions: Firstly,at the lexical level,especially when translating proper nouns such as philosophical concepts in philosophical informative texts,the target text should be“placed in a context rich in culture and languages through annotations and accompanying explanations’ ’.Secondly,at the syntactic and discourse levels,semantic translation or communicative translation need to be flexibly selected according to the specific conditions of the source language.In fact,in translating the same text,semantic translation and communicative translation are often not diametrically separated,but combined and complement each other.