A Translation Report On Chapter 2 In Philosophical Conversations: A Concise Historical Introduction(Excerpts)

The book of Philosophical Conversations: A Concise Historical Introduction from Professor Norman Melchert in Lehigh University is a concise introduction to western philosophy. There is currently no Chinese translation version. The Chinese translation version has a great effect on getting a whole picture of the history of western philosophy for Chinese people, and also plays a helpful role in making comparative study between Chinese and western philosophy for scholars.This paper is a translation report on excerpts from the book of Philosophical Conversations: A Concise Historical Introduction. In this report, the author aims to solve the translation problems arising from the translation of the source text under the guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory. In the process of translation, the author concludes that the translator firstly must understand the meaning of the source text, and find out the translation difficulties in making full use of the related parallel texts, network and dictionary, then use the cross-validation method and qualitative and quantitative analysis to get the usual translation of these difficulties, and lastly apply Nida’s functional equivalence theory to choose the appropriate equivalent words and sentences from four aspects—the word equivalence, syntactical equivalence, textual equivalence and stylistic equivalence. Translation is to use the closest natural and equivalent language from the semantic meaning to the style to reproduce the information of source language. There is no single method for translation, and the appropriate method is the best one.