Translation Of Sociological Texts

As a cross-cultural communication activity, translation serves to achieve the effect of publicity in foreign countries. In this sense, the starting point of this translation project is to present foreign readers with a true image of modern China--the real situation of migrant workers in cities in a way different from that adopted by some foreign researchers who take a biased point of view about study problems concerning China’s urbanization, taking a part for the whole and avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial. Therefore, in terms of the translation strategies of this project, foreignation method predominates over domestication method, i.e. paying attention to the effect of translated version and readers’ understanding. “Truth” is what the English version strives to achieve in the hope of opening the door of objectiveness and fairness for researchers on Chinese problems.The thesis can be divided into four parts. The first part is the task description and theoretical basis, that is, a brief introduction of the main content of the translation material Migrant Workers: System Arrangement and Identity. Against the backdrop of urbanization, the text describes the rights and interests of migrant workers and the possible solutions. The second part is the task implementation-- the process of translation and difficulties to be solved in the aspects of sociological terms, syntax, discourse and relevant legal regulations. The third part is the analysis of cases-- problems encountered during translation and their solutions. Sociological terms can be dealt with in ways such as transliteration, direct borrowing and parallel texts. Syntax problem can be solved mainly in two ways-- one is to reconstruct the logic of original sentence and translate them in new sentence structure; the other is to translate according to the original sentence structure. Discourse problems can be analyzed on the basis of the characteristics of English and Chinese language. And legal regulations quoted in the texts are handled in the light of the principle of normalization and preciseness. The last part is the conclusion and lessons learned from the translation project.