A Report On The Translation Of Popular Science Texts

With the gradually worsening climate problems including global warming,people run into the challenge of survival.Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide,is a popular science book about environmental science,revealing the problems mankind faces,and proposing some countermeasures against the continuously heated earth.It aims to provoke people’s reflection to protect the planet.In the context of global warming,the importance of environmental science translation has become increasingly prominent,which is conducive to enhancing public awareness of environmental protection and promoting the spread of relevant concepts.Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide boasts the typical characteristics of popular science texts.It popularizes environmental science knowledge through plenty of objective facts,data and cases,providing both professional knowledge and easy-to-understand examples.After reading through the book,the translator selected one chapter for translation,and found it’s a typical informative text.Therefore,the translator decided to choose Reiss’ Text Typology as the theoretical basis,to maximize the delivery of environmental science knowledge.This report summarizes the strategies for translating popular science texts from the lexical,syntactic,and textual level.At the lexical level,the translation of terms,abbreviations and proper nouns is mainly discussed,and the information of the original text is accurately conveyed through literal translation,free translation or annotation.At the syntactic level,since the original text owns a large number of passive sentences,attributive clauses and long and complex sentences,the translator adopts such methods as converting the voice,adjusting the sentence order,adding and deleting according to the Chinese language expression habits,which makes the translation easy to understand and reduces the readers’ reading burden to a large extent.At the textual level,four common cohesive devices are discussed,namely,reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction,and translator mainly adopts retaining comparative degrees,explicitation,adding and deleting conjunctions,and compensation to achieve coherence of the target language.This report illustrates that under the guidance of Text Typology,translator should flexibly utilize translation strategies to realize the discourse function of the translation and convey information accurately.This report reflects the significance of Text Typology in guiding the translation of popular science texts,especially those related to environmental issues,and it can provide reference for similar translation practice in the future.