A Report On E-C Translation Of CITIES AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING:Planning,Design And Policy Nexus (Excerpt)

The report is based on the E-C translation of the book,CITIES AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING: Planning,Design and Policy Nexus(excerpt).Access to affordable housing in cities is of utmost importance,underlining its significance for public health and urban resilience.The development process,challenges,and solutions of affordable housing are illustrated in this book,which also examines the successful practices of fifteen western cities.The focus on housing policy,urban planning,and design also helps provide a multidisciplinary,systematic comparative perspective on the future of affordable housing,which will benefit housing development and planning.This translation task is completed under the guidance of the strategy of communicative translation to make sure the target text is clear and concise to understand for the target Chinese readers.The translator analyzes the difficulties during the translation from the lexical,syntactic,and discourse levels.At the lexical level,terminologies and polysemy are frequently used in the source text.In terms of the translation of terminologies,the translator referred to several online dictionaries,the website MBA Library and some parallel texts to select equivalent terms in Chinese.It was also found that adding in-text annotations can effectively supplement the information that the target readers need and remove reading obstacles for readers who are not professional.As for the translation of polysemous words,after understanding the context and logical relation of the source text,the translator adopted the strategies of extension and supplement of meanings to help the target readers understand the source text completely.At the syntactic level,to ensure that the expression effects of the target text are consistent with those of the source text,the translator inserted conjunctions to extend the logical relations implied in the source text.In terms of a large number of long and complicated sentences with complex structures,the strategies of sentence splitting and reorganization were adopted to make the target text clear and fluent and achieve optimal communicative effects.Moreover,the passive sentences in the source text were converted into active sentences in the target text,which conform to the expression conventions in Chinese.At the discourse level,some cohesion devices,such as reference,ellipsis,conjunction,and repetition,were adopted to enhance the cohesion and coherence of discourse.Based on this translation report,the translator hopes to transmit the current development process of affordable housing in western countries,and provide positive support to housing planning and design.Furthermore,a reference for translating similar informative text could be provided for other translators.