A Practice Report On The Chinese Translation Of Scientific American From The Perspective Of Translation Norms Theory

China has been going through its fourth translation climax,during which scientific translation plays an indispensable part.As a sub-field of technical texts,popular science texts demonstrate a writing style of a combination of science works with literary compositions,aiming at promoting and popularizing not only scientific and technological knowledge but also information of social sciences via written language in the way that the public are easy to understand and accept.However,the present situation is not encouraging: the low level of scientific popularization,poor quality in popular science readings and insufficient devotion to scientific popularization.Therefore,introducing outstanding foreign popular science works is still regarded to be a dominating channel to promote domestic popular science originals.As the first popular science magazine published in the US,Scientific American has received contributions from more than 150 Nobel Laureates since it was started publication in 1845.This magazine is considered as a popular and authoritative academic journal.Toury is the first scholar that clearly proposes translation should be an activity governed by “norms”.His Translation Norms Theory can be regarded as a significant outcome of Descriptive Translation Studies(DTS).Based on specific cases,this theory,placing translation activity in a social and cultural context,explores the general guideline,factors governing the translator’s choice of materials,directness of translation and specific translation strategies from its initial norm,preliminary norms and operational norms,which depicts a complete picture of the whole translation process.This report,based on the translation practice of articles excerpted from“Mind” and “Health” columns of Scientific American which are closely related to the hot topic of “COVID-19”,is designed to analyze translation norms the translator abides by during her translation process.This report probes into norms the translator follows when conducting popular science translation under the theoretical guidance of Toury’s Translation Norms Theory,in the hope of widening the applicability of this theory in popular science texts and giving some instructions to popular science translation practice.For initial norm,the translator adopted a strategy of combing “adequacy” and“acceptability”.For preliminary norms,the translator selected popular science works concerning public mental health status under the pandemic of COVID-19,with the purpose of continuing the practice of national popular science translation,relieving public mental stresses caused by COVID-19 and promoting cultural communication between China and western countries.For operational norms,the strategy of adding translators’ footnotes was employed as matricial norms;as for textual-linguistic norms,strategies of addition,verbalization and extension are utilized as lexical norms,division and reconstructing as syntactical norms and translating terminologies and quotations from western literature as stylistic norms.Under the guidance of Toury’s Translation Norms Theory,this paper explores specific norms the translator followed in popular science translation,in the hope of widening the applicability of Translation Norms Theory in popular science writings and providing supporting materials for future practice.