A Project Report On The E-C Translation Of Illustrated Encyclopedia Of The Elements:The Powers,Uses,and Histories Of Every Atom In The Universe(Excerpt)

The translation of popular science in China dates back to the late period of the Qing dynasty,and it has witnessed climaxes one after another over the past century and undertaken to revive the Chinese people.With the rapid growth of the economy in China and close global exchanges of science and technology,popular science translations are a delight to the general public and an important text for advancing the development of science and technology.The report selects the translation of the first sixteen chapters of Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements: The Powers,Uses,and Histories of Every Atom in the Universe.The selected content is mainly a popularization of chemical knowledge,including the chemical elements’ origins,formations,and applications.The original text is a popular science text,possessing the characteristics of science,literariness,popularity and fun.The translation should be faithful to the original text’s content and style to achieve "overall faithfulness" which cannot work without the help of register equivalence.Therefore,the report explores the strategies and methods used in the translation and analyzes cases by properly showing the corresponding field,mode and tenor,thus achieving register equivalence.First,at the field level,the terminology and semi-technical words in chemical texts are time-sensitive and accurate.In order to reproduce the field characteristic of the original text,the translator should supplement academic background knowledge to achieve equivalence in conceptual function.Second,at the tenor level,the translator should extend the pragmatic connotation and retain its concise sentence pattern and amiable narrative tone to achieve equivalence in interpersonal function.Third,at the mode level,the original language is less formal,with more use of colloquial communication and rhetorical devices.The translator should adopt the prepositions of colloquial style and rhetorical devices to establish easy-going linguistic communications with the readers to maintain equivalence in discourse function.The translator strives to achieve overall equivalence and effectively improve translation quality by objectively reflecting the concept of the original field,remaining lost to the tone of tenor,and seizing the way of mode.