A Report On The Translation Of We Are The Weather:Saving The Planet Begins At Breakfast(Chapter3)

This report is based upon Chapter Three of We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast of Jonathan Safran Foer.Chapter Three is titled “Only Home”,with a total of more than 9000 words,which explores the central global dilemma of the time that people are reluctant to accept a fact that human activities cause climate change.This chapter demonstrates that even some of people believe the truth,while they fail to change their lives in response,and only collective action will save the planet.The translation of the text,theoretically,will offer the fundamental reason why human activities are related to climate change tightly,and enrich the resources in this field,thus providing more edge-cutting findings for the Chinese readers.Practically,it is of great necessity for human beings,because it reveals an emergency signal about the environment.At the same time,it asserts ordinary people have a chance of ameliorating what happened to nature.The source text of the translation project has both expressive function and informative function,with the informative function taking a dominant role.As a writing type combined science with literature,popular science articles promise to be rigorous and acceptable.Accordingly,the translation version has to follow the same rules.Given the book features and the author’s purpose,the translation process will go through under the guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence.Guided by Nida’s functional equivalence theory,the original text will be translated into a faithful,smooth and natural version.Through the translation process,three translation difficulties are well worth paying attention to.As for coined words,transliteration,literal translation and annotation will be used in a way of making the TL readers informed.When it comes to nominalization structure,changing its part of speech is exposed to be a usual solution,while amplification is capable of making the structure clear.Extensive usage of passive voice is the most distinctive feature of the original text,because it can ensure the objectivity and the authenticity of the expression.Voice Conversion and changing into a sentence without a subject can solve this problem.