A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Oxford Handbook Of Political Science (Excerpt) Under The Guidance Of Schema Theory

As the most authoritative and comprehensive academic work in Western political science,The Oxford Handbook of Political Science is highly professional and academic.The author chooses Chapter 21 and Chapter 22 of the book as the source text of this translation practice report.These two chapters focus on the discussion about relationship between democracy and state,as well as the expanding domains of democracy and citizenship.The book is an academic paper with strong logic,complex sentence,and a lot of implied political background information,all of which make the translation difficult.The author divides these translation difficulties into three levels,namely,language level,content level,style level,and combines with the Schema Theory to explore translation countermeasures and solutions.According to the above translation difficulties,the author analyzes from the linguistic schema,content schema and stylistic schema,and tries to find out the translation methods of constructing the schema of target text.Here is a conclusion of some translation experience.First,for the translation of political terms and context-constrained words,translators should first excavate the original meaning of the words,and then combine the specific context and logical relationship,and choose the equivalent expression in the target language by appropriately adopting the methods of addition,annotation,conversion,etc.Second,one sentence contains many clauses,modifiers,additional components,and the logical relationship is complicated.Translators should make sure that the logical relationship of sentence composition is figured out,and the content is understood correctly.Then organize the language through the methods of adjusting word order,division,adding logical connection words,etc.,so that the translation can conform to the reader’s expression habits and realize the successful transformation of language style.Third,for the translation of the implicit political background information and logical relations,translators should check up a lot of relative articles and make a necessary supplement to the content by using such translation methods as addition and annotation to achieve the accurate communication of information and correct understanding of readers.Fourth,the source text has been objective and rigorous in diction and content,and uses parallelism.Therefore,translators should accurately grasp the language characteristics and make a flexible transformation to reproduce the writing style and formal language of the source text.This translation practice report explores the difficulties and strategies of political text translation,and summarizes the findings and limitations of translation practice.The author hopes that it has provided some inspiration and help for the translation of political texts,and some reference for the application of the Schema Theory in translation studies.