A Report On Brief Answers To The Big Questions(Chapter Six & Seven)

Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a popular-science book written by physicist Stephen Hawking.The book examines some of the universe’s greatest mysteries,and promotes the view that science is very important in helping to solve problems on planet Earth.The publisher describes the book as "a selection of Hawking’s most profound,accessible,and timely reflections from his personal archive".The book was incomplete at the time of Hawking’s passing away in March 2018,but was completed with his academic colleagues and his family.Hawking discussed many of today’s challenges in this book,including the biggest threat to the planet,climate change,the threat of nuclear war,nuclear power,the development of artificial intelligence(AI)and humans.The book also discusses the "big questions",including life,time,the possibility of time travel and God.Hawking not only unraveled some of the universe’s greatest mysteries but also believed science plays a critical role in fixing problems here on Earth,which he demonstrated in this book and make readers think.The thesis intends to explore the traces of implications and explications of metadiscourse markers in a popular-science book.The research of metadiscourse is usually studied in discourse analysis and language education,but the author found that the metadiscourse is rarely discussed in English to Chinese translation study,such as its translation method or skills.In addition,popular-science books have specific characteristics of objective opinions,brief but intensive information and highly logical structure,so different types of metadiscourse markers can be seen in this kind of text,which can be obstacles during the translating process.The relevance theory proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson can be a guidance for learning cognitive linguistics,which can also be very helpful in translation.Hence,the thesis intended to find the translation method,more specifically,the implication and explication of metadiscourse markers in popular-science books,to not just give the theory,but further analyze the regularities and modes of metadiscourse translation,so that there will be an appropriate metadiscourse database to look up during the future translation.