Report Of The E-C Translation Of The Mindful Teacher(Excerpts)-on Elimination Of Translationese From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

Education has been one of the top priorities in China.As the society develops,people need better education accordingly.Teachers play a key role in the educational development,not only for the students’ learning,but also for their personalities,so they are of great importance to the country’s prosperity.Our country is promoting an educational reform.When an education of Chinese characteristic is encouraged and explored,it is equally important to communicate with and learn from other countries.As such,it is significant for us to translate good books about education that can provide advanced ideas and experiences for reference for Chinese teachers and educational reformers.This paper is a report on a translation project based on The Mindful Teacher written by Elizabeth MacDonald and Dennis Shirley,a book about education reform,published by Teachers College Press,focusing on the quality of teaching and teachers’ career development.The three chapters,namely,Chapter 4 “The Seven Synergies of Mindful Teaching”,Chapter 5 “Mindful Teacher Leadership”,and Chapter 6 “The Mindful Teacher and Technology” are selected for translation in this report.Chapter 4 is about teachers’ practices and seven synergies of teaching,which provide guidance to teachers.Chapter 5 is about teachers’ leadership,helping them to address the challenges of leadership in school.Chapter 6 is about the relationship between teaching and technology,which is often ignored by teachers.It is suggested that teachers should not overuse technology in the classroom;neither do the students in daily lives.Translationese is one of the most important reasons that negatively affect the quality of translation.It makes sentences unnatural and hard to understand,decreasing the communicative function of translated texts.Eliminating translationese to make sentences more natural is a difficulty in English-Chinese translation.Therefore,based on Eugene Nida’s theory of functional equivalence,this paper mainly discusses the elimination of translationese.The paper introduces the definition,features,causes and negative effects of translationese and explores the solutions to eliminate translationese at the levels of word,sentence and discourse.It provides a wealth of examples to describe the features of translationese and the solutions of eliminating translationese by comparing the originaland revised versions of translated texts.At the word level,the means to eliminate translationese includes determination of the word meaning,conversion,amplification,omission and combination.At the sentence level,the solutions include division,properly dealing with passive voice sentences,translation of inanimate-subject sentences and translation of parenthesis.At the discourse level,the paper discusses the proper methods from the perspectives of cohesion and coherence,including reference,ellipsis,substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion.By all these means,the revised text becomes more natural and smooth.This paper aims to provide references for translators to effectively eliminate translationese in social science texts.