A Translation Practice Report Of Scientific Texts From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Science and technology are evolving at an exponential rate.Recently,as Artificial Intelligence(AI)matures gradually,more and more attention is paid to it.While bringing convenience to people's life,it also arouses people's concerns.Most people worry that AI may replace human's work in the future,resulting in large scales of unemployment.Therefore,many scholars at home and abroad devote to research the influences of AI to human beings.This translation practice is excerpted from a popular scientific text,The Driver in the Driverless Car,which lists several nowadays' successful cases of AI development,and also describes the future development of AI in education,medicine and other aspects.Meanwhile,the book will lead readers to ponder the close relationship between the development of science and technology and human beings and allow readers to face the future development of the industry from a dialectical point view.The translator has selected the second chapter of the book for English to Chinese translation practice and taken it as the material for the report with Adaptation Theory being the theoretical framework.Adaptation Theory is a linguistic theory put forward by Jef Verschueren,who is a noted Belgian linguist and the secretary general of the International Pragmatic Society.In his opinion,language is a process in which language users constantly select language means to achieve communicative intention in line with the needs of communicative context.And adaptation refers to the mutual adaptation between the environment of language use and the selection of language structure.Combining with the examples in translation practice,the translator focuses on two aspects: adaptation to the linguistic context and adaptation to the communicative context,in which the linguistic context has been divided into lexical level,syntactic level and discourse level and the communicative context includes social world,physical world and mental world.In the process of case analysis,the translator has pointed out the corresponding translation methods and demonstrated the applicability and explanatory power of Adaptation Theory to scientific texts.In the practice report,the translator first introduces the background,objectives and significance of the selected material.In chapter two,the wholeprocess of translation has been described,such as the theoretical preparation and collection of parallel texts and related terms.Then the translator lists the challenges in the translation practice,and analyzes the material by combining with Adaptation Theory.Finally,the author summarizes the major findings of the report and some problems need to be solved,and offers several suggestions for further study.Through this translation practice,the translator hopes to achieve two goals.On the one hand,the author can improve her own translation ability and master translation skills through the study and application of theory.On the other hand,through the translation of such scientific texts,the translator hopes that readers can reduce excessive worries about the future development of science and technology,so as to view and treat science and technology objectively.