A Report On The E-C Translation Of Children Of Time (Excerpts)

The selected text for this translation practice is the third chapter of the British science fiction novel Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.The book was published in 2015 and won the Arthur C.Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel of the year in August of the following year,the most prestigious British science fiction award.This work is about a series of stories between the last humans who set out to find a new planet as home due to the destruction of the Earth and eventually arrived at the immigrant planet experimented by human scientist Avrana Kern 2000 years ago,and the spider clan on that planet who have evolved rapidly due to Kern’s virus.The book is characterized by the presence of many created words,terms and common words with new meanings at the lexical level,many long sentences with complex structures at the syntactic level,and frequent shifts in perspective and sudden changes to characters’ inner monologues in the course of narration at the discourse level.Based on the above features of the source text,the translator finally selects adaptation theory that emphasizes the consistency of linguistic choices with the communicative context,the communicative object,and the communicative goal as the guiding theory.Under its guidance,the translator considers the translation mainly from two aspects: contextual correlates of adaptability and structural object of adaptability,further analyzing the structural objects at the lexical,syntactic,and discourse level,and summarizing the translation techniques used in this translation practice,such as converting the part of speech,clarifying pronouns,combination,and division,in the hope of providing some references for the translation of science fiction under the guidance of adaptation theory.