Areport On Translating Research Methods In Language Policy And Planning: A Practical Guide(excerpts)from The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation

The book the author chooses as the source text of translation is Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide,a collection of papers edited by Francis M.Hult and David Cassels Johnson(2015).To the author's understanding,the study of language policy and planning(LPP)is a fresh field in linguistics and sociolinguistics,especially in China.There are even fewer books or publications about the methodology in the study of LPP.The book contributes a collection of recent achievements to this new field,so when the author reads this book,she gets the idea of translating it into Chinese for the students and researchers in this field.As for the time limitation,the author has just translated the first four chapters of the book which are taken as the translation task in this report for her MTI thesis.The topic of the translated part is about some fundamental considerations when students and researchers embark on a language policy study.The moment the author starts to do the translation,she unexpectedly finds there are plenty of problems and difficulties related to technical terms,the way of academic discourse,and the interlingual and intercultural expressions in translation.In order to remedy the weaknesses of her linguistic knowledge in the study of LPP,the author has made a good preparation in the translation process,taking the table of terminology in Appendix for instance.Besides,the author adopts Verschueren's(1999)Linguistic Adaptation Theory as the theoretical framework and employs the translation strategies and techniques of lexical,discourse-based and cultural levels.The translation report is divided into two parts.The first part consists of the source text and the translated text,and the second part is the translation report made up of five sections.The first section is about the author's statement of the reason why she chooses the source text as the translation task and the significance for doing it apart from the introduction to the source text.In Section two,the author describes the translation process in detail including the preparations for translation and the problems and difficulties encountered in translation.For considering and pursuing thesolutions to the problems and difficulties,the pragmatic theory of linguistic adaptation and the corresponding translation strategies are introduced in Section three.In the fourth section,the author presents the case study of translation,that is,the analysis of the problems and difficulties from the theoretical perspective of linguistic adaptation.In the last section,the author concludes the report with the lessons and gains from the translation practice and study.