The Report On Translation Of Be Reasonable！A Guide To Critical And Clear Thinking

This report is on the selected English-Chinese translation of a book on logic. The Source Text is the Chapter 3 and part of the Chapter 4(pp.24 to 41 and pp.45 to 54) of the book Be Reasonable! A Guide to Critical and Clear Thinking written by Ronald Frederick Holt. The book is devoted to improving the reader‘s understanding and application of the principles of informal logic and as such is concerned with skillful, accurate argumentation in ordinary, non-specialist language. The basic function of the book should be informative function. For this reason, the translator applied Eugene Nida‘s ideas of dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence into the translation. According to Nida, translation should not strictly adhere to the grammatical structure of source texts and should employ a more natural rendering. In this report, the author analyzes how the translator improved the translation from two levels: word(or phrase) and sentence, according to the differences between English and Chinese languages. At the word(or phrase) level, the translator shifted the class and chose proper meaning of the word, according to the context; at the sentence level, the translator changed words order, split complex sentences or reinvented the whole sentence, so as to ensure that the target text can deliver accurate information and is smooth and natural.