Translation Report On Understanding Environmental Pollution

The translation project in this report is a popular science book entitled Understanding Environmental Pollution, which delivers basic knowledge about various environmental pollutants. Under the backdrop of increasingly polluted environment, it is urgent to improve people‘s awareness of environmental protection. Thus this book is the right one to be introduced. However, only an adequate translation can convey the correct information. Therefore, translation process holds great responsibility to the quality of target text.In the light of Reiss‘s text typology and based on personal translation practice, this report demonstrates how to solve translation difficulties from three aspects: semantic equivalence, lexical adequacy and grammatical correctness and with correspondent translation methods put forward. The core idea of Reiss‘s theory is text type determines translation methods and for hybrid types, it is the predominant function of the source text that should be dominant. Consequently, this report first defines the translation materials as informative text. Correspondingly, literal translation is adopted throughout the target text. However, literal translation cannot enable the target text as effective as the source one. This is because linguistic and non-linguistic factors exert much influence on the conveying of informative function. According to Reiss, linguistic factors involve semantic, lexical, grammatical as well as stylistic element. And non-linguistic factors include audience, subject, time, etc. The priority of which element should be preserved is determined by the text type of source text. Therefore, this report concentrates on how to reproduce a satisfactory target text from the aspect of semantic equivalence, lexical adequacy and grammatical correctness.Semantic equivalence assumes top priority in the evaluation of target text. Translation methods like diction, extension, translating meaning and addition are employed to achieve semantic equivalence. With two versions of target text presented, the report compares and analyzes the different effectiveness of target text under literal translation and the above four methods. The second one is lexical adequacy, which looks at how to translate terminologies, names and units adequately, some of which are dealt with free translation while some are kept with the original forms. Grammatical correctness mainly examines the thoroughness of orientation to the target language. Since target language must be dominant during translation. As a result, recasting, splitting and combination are used to meet this challenge.The aim of this report is to conclude effective translation methods of popular science under the guidance of Reiss‘s text typology. The writer hopes that this translation report can provide a reference for the study of popular science translation as well as Reiss‘s text typology.