RESEARCH ARTICLES IN TOWN PLANNING STUDIES Introduction Research articles in social sciences are characterised by concise syntax, specific

terminology, and thematic progression, that is a linear theme-rheme progression, in which the rheme of a given clause becomes the theme of the following one. Conciseness is often achieved with the ing form. Among its various functions, the ing form can act as a noun, an adjective or it can be preceded by a preposition. Conciseness is also achieved with complex noun phrases. Communicative situation and translation brief: you have been commissioned to translate a research article by Leonie Sandercock entitled Difference, Fear and Habitus: a political economy of urban fears, which is to be published alongside its translation in a Romanian specialised journal in 2010. Your task is to translate the first paragraph, which introduces the economic and demographic changes that led to the American urban crisis of the 60s. After reading and analysing the source text, produce a draft translation, then revise and edit it by checking for accuracy, completeness, consistency, fluency, and acceptability for the communicative situation it is intended for. Preliminary activities: 1) Identify all the ing forms, examine their syntactic functions and suggest suitable equivalents. 2) List all instances of specialised vocabulary which are specific to the sociological topic of this passage and find suitable equivalents. Can you borrow some of them and use them as loan words? Source Text:

DIFFERENCE, FEAR, AND HABITUS: a political economy of urban fears Leonie Sandercock, Urbanistica, 119 1) The American urban crisis of the 60s: fear of the ghetto 2) In American cities since the mid-60s discourses of fear and of urban decline have been allpervasive (Beauregard 1993). 3) The trigger was the inner city rioting that spread across the country from the mid to late 60's. 4) Long-developing changes like post-industrial transformation become crises when a significant number of people take notice of them, and that usually happens when the consequences of gradual change are displayed all at once in what seems like a sudden, violent disruption. 5) The term the urban crisis usually describes this period of particularly violent social upheaval in inner cities from the mid-60s to about 1970, and the sources of this urban crisis are generally attributed to the continuing post-industrial transformation of these inner cities: two decades of sustained black migration to the Northern inner city, largely white and middle class exodus to the suburbs, the flight of capital and especially manufacturing jobs from urban neighborhoods. 6) These structural changes formed the context for the upheavals surrounding the civil rights movement, rising expectations of urban blacks in tension with social and physical conditions in the inner city, and the inadequate responses of the state to the continuing problems of racial conflict, poverty, inequities in housing and education, and increasing criminal violence. 7) As Beauregard puts it in Voices of Decline, a single theme emerged from and gave unity to the fevered discourse about urban decline. 8) The theme was race, the problem was the concentration, misery,

and rebellion of Negroes in central cities, and the reaction was one of fear and eventually panic (Beauregard 1993:169). 9) Thereafter, racial violence (as in the race riot) and racially coded violence (as in the figure of the mugger, who is always assumed to be either black or hispanic) became rubrics under which to reduce the complexity of urban transformation to sharply representable and narratable form. 10) The widespread tendency to understand the relationship between whites and blacks in the postindustrial city as primarily a problem of too little law and order in the ghetto led to what Sharon Zukin has called the institutionalization of fear as a defining principle of urbanism during and after the urban crisis in America (Zukin 1996:39). (adapted from Sara Laviosa, Learning by Translating)