A Report On The E-C Translation Of The New Climate War:the Fight To Take Back Our Planet (Excerpt)

Climate change shrinks inhabitable spaces,reduces scarce resources and deepens injustice,as a result,violent conflicts and wars arise between different countries and regions.American climate scientist Michael E.Mann puts forward the concept of “New Climate War” in The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.The translation of this book and an analysis of it are meaningful in both theoretical and practical aspects.On the one hand,the Chinese translation can help Chinese readers have a deeper understanding about the new climate war,on the other hand,studies on the translation can provide a reference to later studies in relevant fields.Chapter One and Chapter Two of this book have been selected as the material for the translation practice,for these two chapters analyze the origin of the climate war.In the two chapters,the author unfolds despicable resorts adopted by “climate change denialists”,and expresses his contempt on them by satirical language,which makes the work lively but the E-C translation more difficult.To better translate satire in the source text,the translator first classified the rhetorical devices of satire into irony,humor and exaggeration.The Relevance Translation Theory was selected to guide the translation process: the conflict between optimal relevance and maximum relevance should be properly recreated in the target text when translating irony,so reversing and conversion were applied to better present the conflict in the irony.When translating humor,the cognitive environments of both source text readers and target text readers should be taken into consideration,then amplification and annotation were used to remedy the information gap.As for exaggeration,to avoid unreasonable processing efforts caused by differences between the source and the target languages,combination and division were thus adopted to make the translation more natural and acceptable to target text readers.It is hoped that this report can provide some reference to studies on translating satirical discourses in popular science works as well as the Relevance Translation Theory studies.