A Report On The Translation Of The Straying Earth

Science fiction is a literary genre which came into being along with the rise of the industrial civilization.Many of the science fiction works written by western authors have gained popularity among Chinese readers thanks to translation.Meanwhile,although a number of outstanding science fiction works have emerged in contemporary China,western readers know little about Chinese science fiction.This is partly due to inadequate and poor translation.Accurate,idiomatic and smooth translations will be of great help to the worldwide spreading and popularizing of high-quality Chinese science fiction works.On the other hand,science fiction texts present both lexical features of abundant scientific and technological terms as well as coinages,and syntactic difficulties commonly shared in translation practices.All these have been proved to be major translation difficulties of this translation project.This translation report is on the complete translation project of The Straying Earth,a science fiction short story written by Liu Cixin,one of the leading writers of Chinese science fiction.The translator uses CAT(computer-aided translation)tools in the whole process of translation to ensure the validity and consistency of scientific terms,and takes the “translation shift” theory put forward by Catford as theoretical framework for analyzing the translation process and studying structure shifts in science fiction translation.The aim of this translation project is to look for some effective ways to introduce Chinese science fiction to the world.