Explicitation Of Implicit Logical Relations In Popular Science Translation

Researches of translation practices on science and technology indicate that English for Science and Technology(EST),when compared with common English texts,presents a prominent stylistic feature of showing logical relations not only by logical connectives,but by implicit logical connections in discourse.To bridge the intelligibility gap,scientific texts,especially popular science texts,must account for their contents explicitly and logically.Though English is defined as hypotactic and Chinese paratactic,the explicitation of implicit logical relations is of great importance and sometimes indispensable to the English-Chinese translation.Nature Strange and Beautiful,How Living Beings Evolved and Made the Earth a Home(excerpt,hereinafter,Nature Strange and Beautiful),a popular science book,introduces how evolution works and how it makes the natural world more lovable and livable.The translator carries out an in-depth research,based on her English-Chinese translation of four chapters of the book,to explore the employment of the strategy of explicitation in the translation of popular science texts,with a focus on the examination of the expressions that imply logical relations and the methods adopted for the explicitation of implicit logical relations.Through the examination of the translation examples,the translator realizes that implicit logical relations can be expressed at various linguistic levels,by words,phrases,clauses and sentence groups,and the key method of explicitation is to add logical connectives.To reveal the logical relations implied by clauses and sentence groups,the methods of explicitation also include the spelling-out of the implicatures,and the addition of punctuation marks and explanatory sentences.