A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Popular Science Text The Riddle Of The Rosetta (Excerpts) Based On Juliane House’s Translation Quality Assessment Model

The Rosetta Stone is engraved with three-fold texts written in three ancient languages;due to historical reasons,it has been almost the only key to deciphering the ancient Egyptian scripts.It is also one of the precious antiques for understanding ancient Egyptian languages and culture,especially intercultural communication and integration.The text,The Riddle of the Rosetta(2020),selected for this English-Chinese translation practice introduces the entire process of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone inscription,and is a popular science writing about history.The author intends to enrich domestic literature relevant to “Rosetta Stone” or ancient Egyptian languages,and elaborate the relevance of Computer-aided Translation(CAT)and Juliane House’s TQA model(2014)to translation of popular science writings through this translation practice.In light of the stylistic features of translation of popular science writings,as well as the booming development of CAT technologies,the author uses memo Q,a popular CAT software to complete the first version of translation,and summarizes problems encountered during the process: 1)at the lexical level,the ST contains quite many terminologies,names and proper nouns,as well as a few culture-loaded words;2)at the syntactic level,the ST contains numerous long and complex sentences;3)at the textual level,English and Chinese have different ways of cohesion and coherence.Based on House’s newly revised TQA model(2014),the author first carries out analyses of register(field,tenor and mode),genre and pragmatic functions of the ST,and specifies that the covert translation is applicable to this translation;then uses specific strategies to tackle specific problems on a case-by-case basis,completes corresponding modifications to the first version on memo Q,and sorts out translation strategies at the lexical,syntactic and textual levels such as reference,alteration and adaptation;and finally tries to evaluate the translation quality,in the hope of achieving functional equivalence in each level of the translation of popular science writings.The translation practice could serve as a refence for both practices and studies of translating popular science writings,and studies relevant to ancient Egyptian languages,scripts and culture.