A Report On The E-C Translation Of The History Of Energy Flows (Excerpts)

With rapid economic growth and continuous improvement of people’s living standards in the world,energy demand tends to dramatically scale up.Additionally,due to the scarcity of non-renewable energy and mounting demand for fossil energy causing environmental problems,searching for energy transition becomes one of the most important issues in the development of energy regimes.The translator chose part of the first chapter(11.008 words)of the History of Energy Flows as her translating task.This chapter focuses on the organic energy regime,including such biological converters of energy as food,fodder and firewood in human history.This source text is informative and characterized by an objective,concise,logical,and serious tone.In translation,difficulties at the lexical level included the translation of professional terms and polysemy words.Also,there are many long compound sentences and passive sentences in the source text.Under the guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory,this report aims to explore the translation methods and translation techniques that were used to tackle these problems in translating.In view of the difficulties at lexical level,techniques such as semantic extension,addition,and conversion were applied.At the syntactical level,restructuring and cutting were commonly used to deal with long and complex sentences.For passive sentences,a change of voice was adopted.At the textual level,to convey a more natural and fluent translation text,cohesion and coherence were emphasized in translating.Overall then,under the guidance of functional equivalence theory,combined with the application of specific translation techniques in translation,this report is expected to provide some references for more translators.