A Report On The Translation Of Origins:How The Earth Made Us(Chapter 3)

Human beings have always held a sense of awe and curiosity towards the earth,and the origin of human beings is also a question that each of us has ever thought about.The internal relationship between human and environment,as well as the impact of human activities on the natural environment has aroused great concern of the society.In order to get more people to know about foreign excellent scientific works,the translation of scientific writings is of great significance.Therefore,based on the third chapter of Origins: How the Earth Made Us by the British astrobiology researcher Lewis Dartnell and guided by Peter Newmark’s Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation,this report has analyzed the characteristics and difficulties of scientific writing translation and finds out solutions to these problems.According to Newmark’s Text Type Theory,this thesis first defined the text type of the original text: The scientific writing was classified into the informative text,thus,in the process of translation communicative translation should be used properly.At the same time,in order to attract more readers,the use of semantic translation is also essential.The difficulties of this translation are many long sentences and professional knowledge.Therefore,the translator used addition,omission,division and annotation to analyze the content of the text,in the hope of providing some references for the future translation practice and research of the scientific writing.