A Report On The E-C Translation Of Bicycle Urbanism:Reimagining Bicycle Friendly Cities (Excerpts)

In recent years,public rental bicycles have gained popularity in China's cities.As a green means of transportation,bicycling has played a crucial role in tackling congestion in cities,improving personal health,and cutting down air pollution.To advance bicycle urbanism,it is of value to introduce and learn from overseas research about how to locate bike stations and improve the quality of the built environment.As such,this report describes the translation of two excerpts from the book Bicycle Urbanism: Reimaging Bicycle Friendly Cities.The chapters for translation are signal timing equity,site suitability and public participation,covering a variety of fields,such as urban transportation,statistics and information geography.The translation practice was guided by Gideon Toury's theory on translation norms,which ran through the whole process of rendering the original text into Chinese.At the macro level,following the initial norms and the preliminary norms,the translator decided the tendency of the translation version at large,so as to make every effort to ensure the acceptability of the translation text while maintaining its academic nature.At the micro level,in order to produce a more readable and coherent Chinese version,the translator analyzed difficulties of cases in chapter four with the combination of the characteristics of the source texts and the guidance of the two aspects of the operational norms,that is,the textual-linguistic norms with regard to words and sentences,and the matricial norms in terms of sections and chapters.The techniques used include literal translation,shifting hypotactic English sentences into paratactic Chinese ones,changing passive English sentences into active Chinese ones,etc.The significance of the translation task lies in the following three points: 1)introducing western scholars' findings into China;2)providing urban transportation planners and management workers with useful information;3)serving as a reference for the translation of academic papers of social sciences.