A Report On The E-C Translation Of Spark:The Life Of Electricity And The Electricity Of Life(Excerpts)

Popular science books are the main carrier of scientific knowledge dissemination.Its effective dissemination helps improve public scientific literacy and enrich people’s cultural life.In recent years,China’s national scientific literacy has been improving,and the demand for popular science books in market has also shown a diversified development trend.In this context,in order to meet the diversified market demand for popular science books,the author takes Spark: The life of electricity and the electricity of life,a popular science book of life sciences,as the object of this translation practice.This book reveals the relationship between electricity and neurology from an interdisciplinary perspective.It brings readers a wealth of knowledge in cross-disciplinary fields and helps people to further understand the relationship between electricity and life.As a popular science book,the original text has the characteristics of scientificity,literariness and popularity.The scientificity is mainly reflected in the contents related to electricity and neurology,the semantics of abbreviated terms and the use of passive voice;the literariness is reflected in the cultural connotation carried by proper nouns,metaphorical phrases and idioms;the popularity is reflected in the explanation and supplementation of professional knowledge by interjections and colloquial expressions.These textual features also pose many difficulties for this translation practice.This report will explain how translators adopt adaptive translation strategies in the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions to reproduce the above three characteristics,guided by the “three-dimensional transformations” theory of eco-translatology.The case study shows that in the linguistic dimension,the translator adopts annotation plus zero translation techniques for the abbreviations of specialized terms,combination plus omission for interjections and additional translation for passive sentences to make the translation text more suitable to the Chinese language ecological environment in terms of linguistic form and facilitate readers’ in-depth understanding of the development of three kinds of electrotherapy and artificial intelligence in the field of disease treatment;in the cultural dimension,zero-translation with notes,literal translation,transliteration,liberal translation and idiomatic translation enable the translation to fully reproduce the technological and cultural connotations of the proper nouns and the cultural and technical connotations of the metaphorical phrases and idioms in the original text;in the communicative dimension,the recreation of book name and shift of tone and personal pronoun help reproduce the author’s communicative purpose by accurately conveying the communicative intent of the concrete content of the original text and the reader’s colloquial expression.