A Report On The Translation Of Language,Mind And Body: A Conceptual History (Chapters 3-4)

The report is on the translation of Language,Mind and Body: Conceptual History(Chapters 3-4),written by John e.Joseph,professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.It concludes the difficulties and solutions of prepositional phrase translation,attributive clause translation and textual translation under the guidance of Information Structure.Language,Mind and Body: Conceptual History is the first linguistics handbook that relates language to philosophy,psychology,medicine,literature and religion,presenting the explorations on what language is and where it is located in different historical periods.Chapters 3-4 mainly introduce the statements of Plato,Aristotle,Epicurus,Augustine concerning language,mind and body during the antiquity and the middle age.To transfer the information from the source text to the target text correctly and coherently,the translator takes Information Structure as the theoretic guidance to solve the translation difficulties.Based on the analysis of topic and focus,information value and intention,as well as the differences between English and Chinese,the translator mainly adopts the translation techniques of “following the original syntactic order” and “reinventing sentence structures” to deal with the translation difficulties at the syntactic level.Meanwhile,through the analysis of thematic progression,the translator could trace the information flow of the source text.On this basis,the target text should keep the original thematic progression patterns as much as possible to achieve the expressive accuracy and coherence at the textual level.The translation report is composed of four chapters.The first chapter is the project description,which introduces the translation text and the writer,and the significance of the translation project.Chapter two describes the translation process,including preparatory work,while-translation and quality control.The third chapter is the case study from the perspective of Information Structure.Chapter four is the conclusion,which concludes the implications and limitations of the translation project.