Translating Popular Medical Science Texts From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

The high-quality popular medical science texts are significant carriers for accurate disseminations of medical knowledge.During the COVID-19 pandemic,in order to satisfy common readers’urgent needs for a better understanding of the medical field,the translation of popular medical science texts is becoming more important.Based on the English to Chinese translation of Animal Viruses and Humans,a Narrow Divide,a popular medical science text with high scientific popularization value,this paper aims to analyze the difficulties the author encountered during translation from the perspectives of the three rules of Skopos theory,and to explore translation strategies used to address these difficulties,in order to produce high-quality translation of popular medical science texts.The difficulties on the lexical,syntactic and textual level include terminologies and metaphors in specific contexts,frequent use of long and complex sentences and passive voice,and the difficulties in maintaining semantic coherence,logical coherence and the style of the original in Chinese translation.Accordingly,this paper puts forward translation strategies as follows:at the lexical level,annotation and metaphor omission;at the syntactic level,splitting,passive voice conversion and restructuring;at the textual level,supplementing,pruning,adding logical connectives and maintaining stylistic coherence.