A Project On The Translation Of Zero To Birth:How The Human Brain Is Built(Chapter 1 And Chapter 2)

The first two chapters of Zero to Birth: How the Human Brain Is Built,written by William Anthony Harris,a developmental biologist,are selected as translation materials for this project.Based on the development process in various disciplines of life science,Harris provides a comprehensive overview of the evolutionary history of the brain.With its accessible language and plain English,this popular science book caters to a broad audience,unraveling complex concepts and utilizing a wide range of disciplines.From intricate technical terms to sophisticated sentence patterns,the author skillfully weaves a logical narrative,offering readers a deeper understanding of the subject matter.Notably,despite the lack of an existing Chinese translation version,the book serves as a valuable resource for those who are interested in neuroscience.The source text involves various terms and concepts from life sciences and contains many long and difficult sentences,which cause some difficulties in the process of translation.Catford’s translation shifts theory provides a guidance to deal with terms and new words and syntactic discrepancy between English and Chinese as well as to achieve semantic equivalence.Therefore,it is widely used in the process of translation.This project on the translation mainly focuses on lexical and syntactic analysis,which discusses the significance of level shift and category shifts in tackling difficulties of translation.From the lexical aspect,through level shift,words with grammatical meaning in English are properly translated with the language specification in Chinese.And intra-system shift brings proper translation for terms and new words.Besides,class shift is applied to find more suitable Chinese meanings for nominalized words in English.From the syntactic aspect,structure shift is combined with unit shift to work out complex sentences with passive voice and several modifiers.