On Explicitation Strategies For Popular Science Translation From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Science has deeply affected our daily life and has played an indispensable role in the economic and social development.However,sometimes it is difficult for the general public to understand the science,and consequently popular science has come into being.With the increasing academic exchange between countries,popular science readings have become more and more popular in China.The Incredible Human Journey is a typical popular science reading written by Dr.Alice Roberts which is composed of five chapters,including Africa Origins,Footprints of the Ancestors:From India to Australia,Reindeer to Rice:The Peopling of North and East Asia,The Wild West:The Colonisation of Europe and The New World:Finding the First Americans.The Incredible Human Journey not only delineates how early human migrated out of Africa and finally scattered all over the world,but also provides the evidence to support the Out of Africa Theory.This thesis is based on Chapter Three Reindeer to Rice:The Peopling of North and East Asia,which describes Dr.Alice Roberts’ archaeological experience in Asia.Based on the translation of Chapter Three,this thesis focuses on the explicitation strategies from the perspective of Skopos Theory.As a useful translation methods,explicitation tends to convey the implicit content of the source text in an explicit way and the implicit content must be derived from the context and situation.Klaudy,a German scholar,explores the explicitation strategies in translation in terms of obligatory explicitation,optional explicitation,pragmatic explicitation and translation-inherent explicitation.As the core issue of German functionalist translation theory,Skopos Theory argues that translation is a purposeful communicative action and the basic purpose of translation is to convey the original meaning to the target readers.By means of case analysis,the author draws the following conclusions:Grammar explicitation is driven by the fidelity rule and word explicitation by the skopos rule in obligatory explicitation;syntactic style explicitation and logical relationship explicitation are driven by the coherence rule in optional explicitation;and culture explicitation is driven by the skopos rule and implied meaning explicitation by the coherence rule in pragmatic explicitation,which proves that the Skopos Theory has a better explanation towards explicitation.This thesis is composed of five chapters.The background and significance of the research,research methodology and the layout of the thesis are discussed in Chapter One.The second chapter describes the background,content and requirements of the translation task,as well as the translation procedures including the preparation before translation,process in translation and proofreading after translation.Chapter Three introduces the origin and development of the Skopos Theory as well as the three rules of the Skopos Theory.In Chapter Four,the relationship between explicitation and the three rules of the Skopos Theory is analyzed and six explicitation strategies like amplification,specification,lexical repetition,splitting,readjustment of word order and annotation are put forward on the basis of case study.Chapter Five discusses the findings and points out the limitations of this thesis.