Translation Strategies For Attributive Clauses In Social Science Texts Under The Guidance Of Functional Equivalence Theory

This report presents a translation practice based on Chapter Four to Six of Making Sense and Making Science.The book is the summary of three colloquia held at Sorbonne University in 2015,2016 and 2017,mainly discussing the future development prospects of cultural sciences and the influence of linguist Saussure’s theory on cultural sciences.The complexity and variability of translating English relative clauses have always been challenging for translators.Due to the huge differences between English and Chinese,there are obvious differences in syntactic structure and function between English attributive clauses and Chinese attributive.The functional equivalence theory emphasizes that the main goal of translation is to convey the meaning and information of the source text rather than simply translating words.Guided by this theory,if necessary,translators can transform sentence structures during the translation process to make the target readers’ response to the translated information tend towards that of the original readers.This translation practice report is based on the theory of functional equivalence,and focuses on the frequent occurrence of attributive clauses in the selected translation materials.Four translation strategies,including preposition,fusion,division,and conversion,are applied to achieve “functional equivalence” and make the translated text conform to the idiomatic expression of the target language.This report is divided into five chapters.Chapter One provides a brief introduction to the language features of the source text and the significance of the report.Chapter Two details the translation process,including three stages: Pre-translation,While-translation process and Post-translation correction.Chapter Three introduces the theoretical framework of the thesis,including an introduction of functional equivalence theory and an overview and translation strategies for attributive clauses,and briefly discusses the feasibility of functional equivalence theory in guiding the translation of attributive clauses;Chapter Four presents a case study of translation.Referring to the translation methods of well-known domestic scholars,four translation methods,namely,the preposition method,the fusion method,the division method,and the conversion method,are applied to translation practice to improve the translation quality of attributive clauses in social science texts.Chapter Five summarizes the full text and points out the findings and limitations of this translation practice.