A Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of The Excerpts From The Zoologist’s Guide To The Galaxy

Imagination and exploration of alien creatures have never stopped,and science fiction books have been ranked in the bestseller list for a long time.For this reason,I chose three chapters from The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy,published by Dr.Arik Kershenbaum of Cambridge University in September 2020,as the translation material,to share the author’s insights on alien life and explain the problems and solutions encountered in translation.In view of the dual characteristics of scientific content and accessibly words of this popular science books,this report uses “three-dimensional transformation perspective” of Eco-translatology as the theory guidance to ensure accuracy in linguistic dimension,fluency in cultural dimension and clear in communicative dimension.Under the guidance of Eco-translatology,this report expounds the translator’s “adaption” to the bilingual environment and “adaptive selection” of target language.Specifically,on the linguistic dimension,such as the choice between synonymous words and different usage of sentence patterns;on the cultural dimension,such as cultural gaps and aesthetic differences between Chinese and English;on the communicative dimension,such as different thinking modes and ways.This report uses some specific translating skills to solve these problems,such as transliteration,addition of words,omitting words,transformation of subject,parenthesis,word order,voice and category,adding annotations;repeating references,transformation of concretization and abstraction.Through this translation practice,it is found that the Eco-translatology and“three-dimensional transformation” can effectively solve the problems in translation.Therefore,this report can serve as a reference for the translation of popular science books.