A Report On English-chinese Translation Of Popular Science Text: Eat Like A Human

Living in a modern society,people inevitably face the pressure caused by the fast pace of life.Although living standards and health consciousness have been improved,there is still room for improvement in both dietary concepts and dietary style.At present,Chinese health science works are relatively few compared with western ones,and thus health-related translated works are needed.In light of this,the translator chooses the chapters “Plants” and “Sugar” in Eat Like A Human,a popular science book on healthy diet written by American food scientist Dr Bill Schindler,as the translation material.Guided by Professor Hu Geng Shen’s theory of eco-translatology,this report analyses translation examples from the linguistic,cultural,and communicative dimensions.The translator gives full play to her subjective initiative and adapts to the holistic requirements of the ecological environment in order to achieve a balanced translation ecology.At the linguistic dimension,there exist many implied meanings which need to be dug out from the context,and long and difficult sentences are frequently used.The translator takes advantage of her cross-language knowledge and her knowledge about the characteristics of popular science texts to correctly capture the meaning between lines in the specific context.Meanwhile,full use of tools such as dictionaries and search engines to assist in translation is crucial.Multiple treatments such as subject conversion,sentence pattern transformation,order adjustment,and logic clarification are used to accurately convey the information in the source text and make the translation conform to the linguistic ecology of the target language.At the cultural dimensions,the cultural gap inevitably affects the conveyance of the cultural connotations embedded in the source language,and accurate transmission of cultural information poses a great challenge to translator.By analyzing the specific meanings of culture-loaded words and allusions,the translator finds cultural compensation to be an effective measure to fill cultural gaps.Methods of free translation,literal translation,addition,annotation in brackets,and footnotes can be used to compensate for the absence of cultural knowledge,so as to convey the connotations of bilingual culture and enable readers to appreciate the beauty of culture.At the communicative dimension,the author’s communicative intention is either explicit or implicit in the text.The translator not only needs to identify the communicative intention by external formal features,linguistic markers,and other methods but also needs to infer and summarize the author’s communicative intention based on the understanding of the text theme and the context.The methods of paraphrasing and division are adopted to convey the implicit communicative intention so that the reader can obtain the best textual experience from the translated text.This report will provide references and help for the translation of popular science texts on a healthy diet.