A Report On The Translation Of "Applying Cognitive Pragmatics To Critical Discourse Studies: A Proximization Analysis Of Three Public Space Discourses"

This paper is a report based on the translation of “Applying Cognitive Pragmatics to Critical Discourse Studies: A Proximization Analysis of Three Public Space Discourses”, a celebrated academic article published in Journal of Pragmatics in 2014. This innovative article was written by Piotr Cap, a world-renowned scholar and professor at the University of?o′dz′, Poland. In this article, Cap applies proximization theory, a new cognitive-pragmatic model for analyzing the discourses of crisis and threat construction, to his Critical Discourse Studies(CDS), and thereby provides an interdisciplinary methodological tool for CDS. The choice of this academic article as the original text for translation is mainly based upon the following two considerations: on the one hand, the translators in China often focus on the translation of academic monographs, and only a few of them pay attention to the translation of academic articles; on the other hand, few scholars in China know the proximization theory proposed in this article.In the process of translation, Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory is adopted as the guiding theory. Based upon this translation process, a tentative translation model for academic articles is summarized by taking into account the previous studies on Linguistic Adaption Theory in translation and the experience obtained from this translation practice. The report will first give a brief introduction to the basic information of the task, the preparatory work before translation, the entire process of translation, and the difficulties encountered during translation as well as the corresponding solutions. Then problems met in the process of translation will be analyzed on the following five levels: lexical level, sentence level, textual level, grammatical level, and macro-structural level. At the same time, with the utilization of the translation model generated, the translation process and strategies used by the translator or author will be explained in details. For example, whether the source language context or the target language context is chosen to be adapted to when dealing with different problems on different levels. Moreover, concrete examples will be given for further study on the concrete translation methods or skills adopted.The analysis reveals that problems on the lexical level mainly include the translation of abbreviations, the translation of verbal nouns and the ambiguous meaning of the original text.To solve the first problem, both the source language context and the target language context are chosen to adapt to, thus the skill adopted is Zero Translation. As for the following two problems, the target language context is chosen to adapt to. And the translation skills used are respectively Conversion and Amplification. On the sentence level, the problem encounteredlies in the translation of long and difficult sentences. And the target language context is chosen to adapt to with translation methods applied as Embedding, Cutting, Splitting-off, and Reversing. Then, the problem met on the textual level is cohesion and coherence of the entire translated text. To handle this problem, the target language context is chosen to adapt to, and the concrete methods selected are Anaphora and Complementary Translation. When dealing with the problem on the grammatical level, mainly the passive voice, the translator chooses to adapt to the target language context with two methods applied: one is to transfer the passive voice to active voice and the other is to keep the passive voice. In addition, the problem encountered on the macro-structural level rests with the move of the article’s abstract. Here,the source language context is chosen to adapt to and the method adopted by the translator is to abide by the writing convention of the source language.According to the results of this paper, translators can basically choose to adapt to the target language context on the lexical level, sentence level, textual level, and grammatical level, ensuring the translated text conform to the writing habits of the target language.Consequently, the goal of delivering the original academic knowledge in the target context can be achieved. While, the original language context can be chosen to adapt to on the macro-structural level with the purpose of expanding the target language context. The above can be regarded as the general principle for the translation of academic articles.It is hoped that this report can draw the attention of domestic translators to attach importance on the translation of academic articles, thus the new innovative achievements can be well disseminated.