A Report On The Translation Of The Fourth Age(Chapters 1-4)

This translation report is based on The Fourth Age by Byron Reese.This book discusses the relationship of science and technology in human society from three aspects: history,technology and human beings.There are five parts in this book,dividing the history of human science and technology into four stages.The first stage was the primitive society 100,000 years ago,when human beings first began to use fire.Then,mankind entered the farming age 10,000 years ago,which was the real beginning of human civilization in the historical sense.5000 years ago,humanity stepped into the third age.The birth of writing promoted cultural exchanges and the invention of the wheel expanded the scope of human activities.Today,due to the lack of revolutionary technological innovation,we are still at the end of the third age.In the fourth age,the author answered the question whether human beings are also technologies and expressed his beautiful vision of artificial intelligence.As a scientific work,according to the characteristic of the text,the translator chooses Peter Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation theory as the main translation strategies.During the process of translation,the translator encountered a lot of problems.There are a large number of scientific and technological terms in the text.To translate terms,the translator looked up Wikipedia and consulted the students of relevant majors,trying to have a basic understanding of terms.In addition,there are big differences between English and Chinese: English being hypotaxis while Chinese being parataxis;the arrangement of the two languages in sentence patterns;the choice of vocabulary speech.In order to make the translation more fluent and accurate,speech conversion,change of voices,amplification,and semantic extension were applied.The last part is the revision and polishing of the translation.On the premise of faithful to the original text,“translationese” should be removed to ensure the readability of the translation and conform to the expression habits of Chinese.Through this translation practice,the author has deepened his understanding of the relationship between translation theory and translation practice by searching background knowledge,reading parallel texts and repeatedly revising the translation.At the same time,in order to be a qualified translator,one should have abundant knowledge,solid theoretical foundation and strong bilingual conversion ability.