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Part 1: Translation
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Chuyi Wang

Rachel Feldman

Writing 2

November 25, 2019

Part 2: Reflective Analytical Essay

Who doesn’t want to save money? Benjamin Franklin says that “a penny saved is a penny

earned.” This means money saving is the same as money earning. In this project, what I want to

express is that we can use this kind of economic thinking to understand the world more rationally.

In other words, the reason we are learning the intricacies of economics ultimately to help us save

money. For this reason, in this translation I tried to connect economic concepts with money saving

tips for when people buy airline tickets. For the translation part of work, I chose the textbook titled

“Microeconomics: Theory and Applications” from my economics class written by Edgar K.

Browning because it contains discourse that is relevant in contemporary society. Browning talks

about the main ideas of microeconomics and several market models by using common examples,

and these economic concepts still find relevance today in a new age where technology has

progressed. This work does not summarize every specific theory discussed in the textbook, but it

is concerned on several basic concepts. Although this textbook is faced to people majoring in

economics, I translated it to a blog post which is a simplified, easy genre to follow. I used non-

academic vocabulary, easily understandable grammar, short sentences, and interesting examples

to appeal to readers. The translation follows both the strategies of instrumentation and mutual

enrichment, since it not only picks important ideas from text, but also implements applications to

text itself.
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To make my translation more interesting, I chose the new genre of the blog post because it

is one of the new avenues in the modern age where the mass seeks inter-communication and

brainstorm. Different from academic resources or Wikipedia, it is a kind of communicative media

platform that people use in order to exchange the ideas and connect to the world. Further, my target

audience is people who plan to travel in the future or travelers who want to save money. Reading

this blog, they have an opportunity to choose whether to explore how sellers gain from trade and

buyers cover their “sunk cost” or just know how to save money from buying airline tickets

(Browning). I hope to reveal that genre is a macrostructure that is flexible, dynamic, and evolving.

Through translation, the audience can change when the source text changes as a way of interacting

and acting changes linguistically. In this text, I was able to shift the genre from academic

(economic article) to non-academic (travel blog post) and change the discourse community to a

dual audience: a general audience who plans to travel by air and specific audience of students who

want to save money. It is imperative to note that whereas the source text was mostly academic and

targeting an academic audience, my text is non-academic and targets all of the general audience as

well as this specific subgroup.

However, I faced many obstacles when I started to translate. For example, one problem I

encountered is a mismatch between the content of the textbook and reality. Some concepts and

models in the textbook are ideal and already simplified for scholars or students to analyze.

However, in reality, the market is complex, and we cannot fit airlines as a simplified and pure

competitive market. We must consider other elements, including human actions based on

psychological effects, current situations, and government policies. In economics, we would assume

that “the behavior of market participants based on a careful, deliberative process that weighs

expected benefits and costs” (Browning and Mark 6). This shows that, in fact, we cannot predict
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everyone’s behaviors in the real market. Therefore, if I just use the ideal economic model to explain,

it would fail to develop a coherent and persuasive argument and even would mislead others.

Another difficulty I encountered was the application of my comprehension of Browning’s words.

Although it is the textbook of my major class, the professor would pick concepts and definitions

from this book to teach in lectures. However, if I read the whole book, it takes me a long time to

understand examples of each theory and the diagrams. It definitely gives me a new way to think

about those economic concepts. For example, as the theory of “sunk cost” is not the key point of

chapter one of this book, before I translated this concept, I needed to understand it first and then

made it easier to understand. I searched its definition and examples in Google, and then I watched

some YouTube videos to see how others connect this idea with daily examples. Just like Walter

Benjamin points out that translation can represent the hidden relationship whether it is specific or

seminal (Benjamin). My job is to translate original professional text into an easier understanding

and popular style writing. Although this translation process is difficult, I found it helps me detect

slight details in personal choices and provide insights into economic models and theories.

One concern I had to keep in mind was intertextuality. Browning uses many professional

words and connects many economic concepts to create a new literary work. Walter Benjamin

indicates that translation is essential to the specific meaning inherent in the original work is

expressed in translation. In the “Microeconomics: Theory and Applications,” Browning uses

words such as “sunk cost,” which may be translated as “cost that already occurred” in an easy

understanding way (Browning). In this context, I always had to try and recontextualize his source

to find an easy and similar meaning. I had to remain vigilant not to read the entire text as an

economics textbook but to ensure that I noticed how these texts work on my new discourse

community. I believe that a blog post is read by a wide audience and therefore tried to write using
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formal and semi-formal content. My use of tone and vocabulary was effective in that I employed

words people are familiar with, such as “price differential, rewards, cost” in the translation. I used

simple sentence structures that were short in order to reduce the length of paragraphs and make for

easier reading. Moreover, in “Understanding Comics,” McCloud indicates that pictures can

simplify the abstraction and make ideas to be more acceptable (McCloud). For this reason, I

inserted some pictures from some famous airline websites to support my ideas. Those pictures

would make my blog post easier to understand and strengthen my ideas.

Through this creative project, I used many ideas I learned from writing class and related

them to my translation. Although the blog post is a kind of non-academic writing, it still needs to

follow some rules and has its own discourse community. In my blog post, I organized my ideas

and rewrote theories from the textbook, which is the same as writing essays. But the blog posts

have less restrictions and more innovations including pictures, emojis, and punctuations. Although

genre translation is challenging for me since I was worried about my translation work would more

like a summary of the original text, the new genre gave me a new way to think about those ideas.

Because the blog post is based on the internet as new technology is the most widely accessed

avenue for information, after translation, those professional concepts become more relevant and

well-received. Genre, as an aspect of context, can change and find new relevance and inferences.
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Work Cited

Browning, Edgar K., and Mark A. Zupan. Microeconomics. Theory and Applications. J. Wiley,

2004, PP. 1-20 243-262.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: Writing and Art. Harper Perennial, 1994.Rendall,

Steven. “The Translator’s Task, Walter Benjamin (Translation).” TTR, volume 10,

numéro2, 2e semester 1997, p. 151 – 165. https://doi.org/10.7202/037302ar.