A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of A History Of Energy Flows:From Human Labor To Renewable Power(Excerpt)

Now that energy plays a vital role in contemporary economic and social development,it is significant to understand energy-related knowledge.The book A History of Energy Flows: From Human Labor to Renewable Energy gives a detailed description of energy development from organic energy,mineral energy to renewable energy and alternative energy.Unlike other documents on energy,which mostly focus on the development and utilization of new energy,this book provides a new perspective for people to understand energy-related knowledge,so the fifth chapter focusing on the history of manufactured gas and natural gas is selected as the translation material for this translation report.Under the guidance of Nida‘s functional equivalence theory,the author explained and analyzed the problems encountered in the translation process.The translation report mainly includes the following three parts: translation task description,translation process description and case analysis.Among them,case analysis is the focus of the report: at the lexical level,the report deals with the problems encountered in the translation of professional terms,nominalized words and metaphorical words contained in the scientific and technological texts in the energy field and offers corresponding solutions;at the syntactic level,the methods for the translation of passive sentences and long sentences are discussed;and at the textual level,the report probes into how to deal with the lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion used in the source text in translation.Based on the translation practice and report writing,the author gains the following three aspects of insight regarding the translation of scientific and technological texts in the energy field,: Firstly,the author has a better understanding of the language features of scientific and technological texts in the energy field.Secondly,in light of functional equivalence theory,the author discusses the solutions to different difficulties such as specialization of energy texts and cross-language differences from the lexical,syntactical and textual levels by making use of such translation strategies and techniques as literal translation,amplification,omission,conversion,restructuring,and what not.Lastly,by means of this translation practice,the author‘s linguistic analysis ability,bilingual conversion ability,and search capability have all been improved to a certain extent.It is hoped that this report may shed some light on the translation of scientific and technological texts in terms of text type analysis,translation strategies and techniques selection.