Report On Translating “The New Economic Geography: Past, Present And The Future”

The report presented here is a summary of the writer’s experience in translating the paper entitled “the New Economic Geography: Past, Present and the Future”. As a newly emerging field, the new economic geography presents a great leap forward in social science in western countries through studying economic phenomenon and geographic distribution together and taking space factor into consideration. While in China, our development, as the writer knows, benefits little from the theories of this new subject, for which language obstacles take a great responsibility. Quite by accident, the writer got this very paper and decided to translate it into Chinese, hoping to inspire people related to or interested in this field.To begin with, several kinds of translating theories have been taken into consideration in the course of this project. Due to its scientific nature, the writer has referred to the experience of former translators, most of whom seem to prefer adopting skopos theory, a major theory of German functionalism. On one hand, it really is a proper choice for informative texts of general type; on the other hand, the article chosen is special in some aspects, problems on maintaining both the seriousness of its content and the literal grace of its form would arise if the writer observed the said theory only, so it is not enough for translating this very article, named “the New Economic Geography: Past, Present and the Future”, which requires a more comprehensive one. Guided by skopos and some other theories, the writer has proposed solutions of her own to problems met in the course of translating. For example, in dealing with long and complicated sentences, dynamic equivalence and reader-response theory have been taken into consideration so as to avoid Europeanized expressions which may pose offense to Chinese readers’ reading habit.In addition,a variety of translating methods have been applied to this project. Where there is hidden meaning to convey, there is amplification; long sentences see the use of division; to complicated expressions, synthetic translation method is applied; when the usages of English and Chinese differs, you will find conversion. These methods are usedto convey the meaning of original text faithfully and properly. What is more, as you can see from the appendix at the end of this report, the original text is written in dialogue form. Therefore, new difficulties arise when the problem on how to translate without reducing its original literal grace comes. According to its definition, we know that the literal grace of a text lies in its expression, description, image, structure and aesthetics etc. The writer gets down to maintaining its literal grace mainly from the latter three aspects.At last, from the writer’s point of view, a comprehensive strategy should be made to reach the standard for translating, for which skopos is not enough but can be used as analyzing approach. In the course of translating “the New Economic Geography: Past, Present and the Future”, a variety of methods have been applied. You will find out how and why in the following writing where the writer states out her own opinions by comparing different versions of translation under the guidance of difference translating strategies. This report is an attempt to find a relatively proper translating strategy for scientific articles like the one present here.