A Report On The Translation Of The Invisible Rainbow:A History Of Electricity And Life (Chapter 1-3)

The source text is an excerpt from The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life,written by Arthur Firstenberg.The book explores the relationship between electricity and life,aiming at reminding people of the possible negative influence on living creatures.It belongs to the popular science text type and its language and the content are easy,concise and affluent.Considering this feature,the author of this report chose Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence theory as the guideline of this project.The target text pays much attention to the meaning of the source text,rather than its language forms,and requires naturalness and equivalence.During the translation process,it was found that the author had used some rhetoric devices,static expressions,as well as passive voice.Besides,there are some sentences with complex structures,which usually inserted a lot of modifiers and clauses.Guided by the functional equivalence theory,the translator had made some adjustments according to the target readers’ language habits when dealing with the original linguistic forms,and adopted different translation methods at lexical level and syntactic level so as to achieve the maximal equivalence between the source text and target text.For example,when dealing with such rhetoric devices as simile and metonymy,the translator chose free translation;when rendering some static expressions,she will convert their parts of speech;as for the sentences with passive voice,they will be changed into active voice;and if there are sentences with complex structures,with a lot of modifiers and clauses,she will resort to restructuring.The author of this report hopes that the solutions she had offered to the four translation difficulties above could shed light on the same type of translation in the future.