A Report On The Translation Of The English Popular Science Book Breakfast With Einstein:The Exotic Physics Of Everyday Objects(The First Two Chapters)

The text for the translation practice in this report includes the first two chapters of the book Breakfast with Einstein:The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects.The writer,Chad Orzel,starting from common objects in people’s daily lives,explains how quantum physics makes a mundane morning not ordinary.Based on some research on science translation,this report finds that the translation of science text puts its emphasis on the transmission of facts and information,which requires target-readers-oriented translation to cater for their habits of language usage.In this way the translator can achieve better communicative effects.As science text contains knowledge of a particular field,science translation is not an easy task.In the translation practice,this report mainly deals with the following problems.First,some common words may have other meanings not usually seen in daily contexts.These words are not easy to be recognized as Physics terms,so the translator need to select the most appropriate and accurate meanings under the context of a Physics text.Second,there are many long sentences in the source text.Due to differences of Chinese and English in sentence structures,some long sentences are often reorganized in the translation process instead of following the original sentence structures.Third,if some words in the source text are translated according to their original word class,it may lead to unidiomatic target text.As a result,conversion of word class is needed.Fourth,sometimes for the sake of conciseness,some information may be omitted in science text which,if translated without addition,may result in confusion among target readers.Therefore,it is important to add some necessary information or information implied but not mentioned in the source text.This report introduces the lexical,syntactical and rhetorical features of science text and by analyzing the difficult points in the translation practice,the report summarizes four translation strategies including selecting appropriate meaning for Physics vocabulary,reorganizing sentence structures,shifting word class and adding.