A Critical Commentary On The E-C Translation Of "Whose Dance Is It Anyway?:Property,Copyright And The Commons”

The source text selected by the translator in the translation project is “Whose Dance Is It Anyway?: Property,Copyright and the Commons”,which is an academic article published in Theory,Culture & Society in 2021.The source text mainly studies the concept of property that relies on both the commons and personhood in the context of dance.The article believes that the more we try to classify dance into the existing modes of copyright and the traditional concepts of property,the more it resists,subverting the core assumptions of Locke’s social contract theory.Although copyright has become increasingly important for dancers and choreographers,it may also hinder their own development.The article triggers scholars to rethink the attribution of dance,and it is innovative and of academic values.Therefore,its translation can help domestic scholars and researchers to understand foreign researches on the copyright of dance and promote the development of domestic researches on this issue.The source text,as an academic article,is an informative text,so conveying information is its main function.According to Eugene Albert Nida’s theory of functional equivalence,translation should obey the rules of reproducing the meaning of the source text firstly and reproducing the styles secondly.Therefore,the theory of functional equivalence has applicability in guiding this translation practice.In order to make the target text convey the message of the source text faithfully and conform to idiomatic expressions of the target language,and to make the target readers have a response similar to that of the original readers,the translator has used a variety of translation strategies,such as the conversion of the part of speech,the conversion of expressions with negative affixes,the change of word order,division,repetition and amplification.The main body of this critical commentary mainly analyzes some difficulties and strategies at the lexical level,the syntactic level,the textual level and the stylistic level respectively in the translation from the perspective of functional equivalence,showing the guiding significance of the theory of functional equivalence for the translation of an academic article.At the same time,it also suggests some practical translation strategies for solving the common problems as an empirical reference in the translation of an academic article.