A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Book Of The Ocean (Chapters 11-13)

In recent years,with the strengthening of marine science education,as an important means of publicity and education,marine science books,together with their translated versions,have received more and more attention.In particular,the Chinese version of foreign marine science texts can provide richer reading materials for domestic marine enthusiasts.Based on this,chapters 11-13 of The Book of the Ocean,written by Ernest Ingersoll,a famous American writer,are selected as the source text for this translation practice.This book is a popular science book centering on the ocean,and the selected contents cover the whaling and fishing industries,the survival of rare marine plants and animals and so on.The selected texts tell how the predecessors explored and profited from the industries of marine animals and plants as well as the habitats and habits of some rare plants and animals like horseshoe crabs and squids.According to Newmark’s Text Typology,this selected material is a popular science text with informative function with vocative function.Therefore,in order to ensure the popularity of the source text and achieve the scientificity and literariness of the popular science text in the translation process,with the theory of semantic translation and communicative translation as the guide,those problems encountered in the translation process are analyzed.The translation of cultural-loaded words,nouns of marine organism and polysemous words is discussed at the lexical level,and the methods of transliteration,free translation and word meaning extension are used during the translation to convey the message accurately.At the syntactic level,the translation of long sentences,passive sentences and sentences with inanimate subjects is discussed.In the process of translation,the translator chooses division,the adjustment of word order,voice shifting and addition to make appropriate adjustments of the sentence structure and language form on the basis of faithfulness to the original meaning so that the target readers can gain the same reading experience as the readers of the source language as much as possible.The translation at the textual level mainly deals with the lexical and grammatical aspects by means of the methods of substitution,omission,and adding conjunctions to achieve the coherence of the discourse.Through this translation practice,it’s found that semantic translation and communicative translation can offer an important guidance to the translation of marine science texts and they are complementary and indispensable.It is hoped that this report can provide some help for the future readers and the translators engaged in marine science translation and research.