A Report On The Translation Of Excerpts From Eating The Sun: Small Musings On A Vast Universe

This thesis is an English-Chinese translation report with its source text from a popular science book titled Eating the Sun:Small Musings on a Vast Universe written by Ella Frances Sanders.This book explains astronomical,physical,and biological phenomena to teenagers with plain language.This translation report selects the first 26 articles of the book as its source text.In recent years,with the rapid development of machine translation technologies,although the quality of machine translation has gradually improved,there are still differences between machine translation and human translation.Hence,post-editing is necessary and important.According to Reiss’s text typology(2014),since the source text is informative,its translation should be simple and clear.Informative texts,focusing on contents,have many terms and fixed sentence patterns,and are suitable for machine translation.Therefore,in this translation report,the author uses machine translation and post-editing mode to translate the source text.In the process of post-editing,problems the author encountered are mainly reflected at two levels:the lexical level and the syntactic level.At the lexical level,problems are mainly terminology mistranslation and inconsistency,pronouns redundancy and ambiguity,and improper collocation;at the syntactic level,problems are mainly literal translation of passive sentences,proverb mistranslation,clause mistranslation.In the process of post-editing,the author adopts translation methods such as explanatory translation,addition,omission,and linear translation to ensure that the translation is simple and clear.Hopefully,this report will provide some reference for popular science book translation in the future.