Application Of "Principle Of Equal Inferential Distance" In Translation Practice

This paper is a translation practice report about translation experience.During the postgraduate program for master's degree,was entrusted by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House to independently undertake the task of translating the book Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings which is in Japanese into Chinese.In the process of translating the book,the author noted that several key words were repeatedly used.However,due to different contexts,different translation approaches were adopted.The author has deeply realized the importance of theoretical instruction in translation practice after studying translation theories and conducting translation practice in the university.In the process of translating Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings,the author came across varied problems.The most disturbing one is how to go beyond forms and fully demonstrate connotations of the original text in the translated version.In the process of looking up in plenty of materials to solve the translation problems,the author noticed the "principle of equal inferential distance" proposed by WANG Jianguo,a scholar in China's translation field,in 2002.Through meticulous reading,it's believed that the method of "making the target text hypothesis set and the source text hypothesis set consistent" advocated by the principle is applicable the translation of Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings,and plays an enlightening role in the selection of translation approaches for the same word under different contexts.Therefore,the author decided to use the "principle of equal inferential distance" to cope with problems in the translation process.This report,instructed by the "principle of equal inferential distance",selected actual cases from the Chinese translation of Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings to explore how to realize the principle in three aspects of word,sentence and discourse.By analyzing actual translation cases,the application of the principle to instructing the Chinese translation of Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings can be explicitly elaborated.This translation practice report is composed of three parts.Part one mainly introduces the theory of the "principle of equal inferential distance" which was proposed by WANG Jianguo based on the relevance theory and the feasibility of using the theory to guide and evaluate Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings.The principle was designed to provide a concrete and feasible method for pursuing "fidelity" of translation.Its means are as follows:first,translation is a double communication activity which comprises of two processes:"the original communicator's communication with targeted receivers,i.e.interlingual communication of the source language" and"interlingual communication of the target language conducted between the translator and receivers of the target language".Each kind of communication is a dynamic intentional process of the communicator's assumption about receivers.Second,whether the original communicator's communication intention can be successfully delivered or not depends on whether the translator can understand the original communicator's information intention.The key lies in the translator's grasp of the hypothesis set in the information intention.Third,due to different cognition environment of the intended receivers,the translator need to adjust ways of expressing hypotheses while delivering the communicator's hypotheses.When necessary,the translator should give up the form to keep the meaning so as to loyally relate the meaning of the original text.Chinese and Japanese have something in common to some extent.However,obvious differences exist in concrete use.Only when code switching is completed by maintaining the pragmatic space of the original text without being confined to morphology can true loyalty be realized.Hence,the"principle of equal inferential distance" is applicable to guiding and evaluating the practical Japanese-Chinese translation process.Part two,based on case enumeration,focuses on comparing advantages and disadvantages of different translation approaches and analyze ways of applying the"principle of equal inferential distance".This part will analyze through actual cases how to realize semantic equivalence in the conversion process of two languages at three levels,word,sentence and discourse.The following conclusions are expected to be reached:1.In terms of word level,equal bilingual semanteme quantity or structure is pursued to realize semantic equivalence;2.At the sentence level,equal internal meaning structure between the target text and the source text is pursued to realize equivalence of sentence meaning.3.Regards to the discourse,equal meaning of semantic chains is pursued to realize equal discourse meanings.By doing so,loyalty translation of the entire text is eventually materialized.Part three will further conclude and analyze problems of the translation text in the translation of Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings from three modules of word,sentence and discourse based on methods of materialization in part two.On this basis,it illustrates detailed application of text translation with guidance of the "principle of equal inferential distance".First of all,it points out that inspired by the principle,the meaning potentiality of word,sentence and discourse should be activated in the translation process;second,the ways of applying the principle are clarified by analyzing detailed examples of three levels.Concretely speaking,in the word translation process,semanteme analysis is regarded as a means to realize semantic equivalence by maintaining the semanteme space of the source language in the target language;while translating sentences,the collocation words in the source text are considered as the extension point.Proper expressions in the target language should be selected according to mutual restraints among words,thus making internal meaning structures of the target language and the source language equivalent;when translating the most complicated discourse,coocurrence and recurrence relations should be deftly utilized to accurately understand the source text,and reconstruct semantic chains pursuant to the language habits of the target language.Then links within the semantic chains of the source text should be re-presented in the target language to work out loyal translation.The translation process of Kashiwa Sato on Meetings Achieving Breakthroughs in Your Conventional Meetings is restored through the analysis above to review and summarize the translation achievements again in the hope of further improving future translation practice methods.