Study On The Translation Of Philosophical Texts Based On The Functional Equivalence Translation Theory

This paper is based on the translation from French to Chinese of a book written by Michael de Saint Cheron,Entretiens avec Emmanuel Levinas 1983-1994.In this philosophical work,the author expounded Levinas' philosophical thoughts through the dialogues between the author and the French philosopher Levinas,on one side,and through the real or imaginary dialogues between Levinas and Heidegger,Sartre,Malraux,Paul Ricoeur and other philosophers,one the other side.The parts of my translation are the first chapter "Introduction.Vingt ans a l'ecoute de la parole levinassienne",a part of the second chapter "Entretien avec Emmanuel Levinas 1983-1994",the forth section "Autrement que penser avec Levinas:une philosophie de la rupture" and the fifth section "La question de Dieu apres Auschwitz" of the third capter"De la phenomenologie du visage a une philosophie de la rupture".This article explores the process of the translation project in detail,analyzes the difficulties encountered in the translation and my corresponding solutions,and aims to provide some thoughts and inspirations for the translation of philosophy texts.This report is divided in four main chapters:The first chapter begins with a detailed description of the translation project,including the project profile,the author's introduction and the text's presentation.Since Levinas and most of his thoughts discussed in this book are not well known in China,We present a brief introduction of Levinas and his work first.Then this paper illustrates the process of this translation.This process is divided into three parts:the pre-translation preparation stage,the formal translation stage and the proofreading stage.In the preparation stage,for a macroscopic understanding of my translation,I read the the text and searched relevant background information.In the translation phase,I asked myself to be faithful to the original text,and strived to overcome the difficulties encountered in the translation.In the proofreading stage,I read the original and the translation several times,corrected the understanding mistakes,the misusage of words and optimized the expression.The second chapter discusses the nature of the translation task and translation strategies.This chapter first describes the speculative,comprehensive and conceptualized characteristics of philosophical language,and then discusses the special characteristics of Entretiens avec Levinas.Then,We examine the target readers of this translation task and its desired effect.Finally,on the basis of the analysis above,this chatper shows the principles and strategies of my translation,and this part also focuses on the revelation of translation given by Levinas's philosophy.In the third chapter,by using the functional equivalence translation theory of Nida,the translation of the philosophy texts is analyzed through several practical cases.We choose some important philosophical vocabularies that are difficult to deal with in the translation,describe in detail my thinking processes and the methods of translation.This part focuses on the translation of the key word of Levinas' thoughts,"autrement qu'etre" and its extension concepts.In addition to the vocabularies,the way of dealing with long sentences in philosophical texts is also investigated.The fourth chapter is a summary of this translation task.This chapter summarizes the gains and reflections obtained in this translation,as well as some weaknesses of my work.