A Report On The Translation Of Immigration And American Jobs

With the rapid growth of social sciences in the West, an increasing quantity of sociological texts needs to be translated from English into Chinese. The translation of such texts so far, however, has been challenged by the unsystematic organization of the stages and steps in the process of translation and the unsatisfactory effect of the translated texts. It is therefore important for the author to contribute to the development of sociology translation through participating in the translation of one of such texts, i.e., Immigration and American Jobs, and through reporting and analyzing the author's personal practice of translating the sociological text. With the expansion of nonliterary translation studies in general, the reporting and study of sociology translation has been prosperous in recent years, producing a miscellany of relevant reports and papers. Frequently, however, such reports and studies have failed to investigate and appreciate the translation of sociological texts in a systemic way and, consequently, are of little relevance to the guidance of sociology translation practice in the future. It is therefore necessary for the author to write a report on her own translation practice on the basis of systemic procedures and principles of translation.First of all, this report narrates and comments on the procedure of the translation of the economic text on the basis of Jia Zhengchuan's Systemic Translation Procedure to see whether it is appropriate or optimal. It is revealed that, the procedure of this translation practice is in general appropriate, consisting of the four stages of pre-translation work, source text analysis, target text production and post-translation work as prescribed by the Systemic Translation Procedure; in some steps of certain stages, however, the translation is not properly carried out, leading to translation problems. Secondly, this report provides a depiction and examination of the translated text on the basis of Nida's Functional Equivalence Principle to check whether functional equivalence between the translation and the original is achieved. It is shown that the translation in most cases is functionally equivalent to the original in meaning and in style, though it is also with its errors and other drawbacks.It is hoped that this report will be important both to translation practice and to translation research. On the level of practice, its findings will reveal that successful sociology translation can be accomplished as long as the translator proceeds along the Systemic Procedure and follows the Principle of Functional Equivalence. On the level of research, its methodology may help to improve the methods in the systematic description and analysis of sociology translation practice in particular and the field of nonliterary translation on the whole.