A Report On Translating The Excerpts Of John Dewey's Ethics:Democracy As Experience Under Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory

John Dewey is an American philosopher,educator and the main supporter of pragmatism.Dewey does not deliberately construct a complete ethical framework Instead,his ethics is based on the transformation of the concept "experience" in traditional philosophy and the criticism to moral experience.In John Dewey's Ethics Democracy as Experience,the author Gregory Fernando Papas synthesizes all related works concerning Dewey's ethics to reconstruct Dewey's moral philosophy,which greatly enriches the debate on ethics and democracy in contemporary philosophy.This translation report is based on the author's translation practice of the 4th section "Morality as Experience " and 5th section "the 'What'of Moral Experience" of Chapter two in the book,which introduce Dewey's naturalistic ethics in an extensive and pioneering manner,bringing Dewey's qualitative experience to the forefront of moral thought research.This report is divided into six parts.Chapter one introduces the background and significance of the report;Chapter two explains the subject matter of the source text,namely Dewey's ethics and his views of moral experience;Chapter three elaborates on the translation process,where the preliminary translation work focuses on the analysis of the source text,both in content and language.Parallel texts are read and appreciated to acquire basic philosophic knowledge and terms in relation to Dewey's thoughts,and linguistic features of the source text are summarized at the lexical level and syntactical level;Chapter four introduces the development of Nida's theory of equivalence and the specific application of Functional Equivalence Theory in this report;Chapter five is a case study under the guidance of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory.At the lexical level,polysemy and synonyms prevalent in the source text are accurately defined to clarify the ambiguities by using component analysis and semantic structure analysis;at the syntactical level,the translation of complex sentences containing subordinate clauses is flexibly handled with by techniques of additions,subtractions and alternations to manifest the logicality in the translation.Finally,the author summarizes and reflects on the present translation and puts forward some improvement measures.The author hopes that the rendering of excerpts of the book can enhance the readers' understanding of Dewey's ethical thoughts,and that this report can provide useful reference for the translation of philosophical texts.