A Practice Report On The E-C Translation Of Popular Science Texts About COVID-19 Based On Text Typology Theory

As a catastrophic pandemic in 2020,COVID-19 has a great impact on people’s life.All countries should join hands to fight the pandemic by sharing their latest research results.Popular science text is an important medium for the dissemination of knowledge,so more attention should be paid to its translation.National Geographic,enjoying a long history,is rich in content and authoritative.At the same time,it also pays attention to the humanistic concern and tells the story from the perspective of ordinary people so as to enhance readers’ identity.Therefore,the translation of its articles can also provide reference for the development of popular science in China to some extent.In this report,the seven articles selected to translate are from the topic of “Updates on the coronavirus pandemic” on its official website.Reiss’ s text typology theory focuses on the achievement of text functions and divides text into informative text,expressive text,operative text and audio-media text,believing that the type of text determines the translation strategy adopted by translators.Modern popular science texts not only convey information to the public,but also pay attention to the communication with readers,hoping to inspire them to think and take corresponding actions,so popular science texts have both informative function and operative function.This report,guided by Reiss’ s text typology theory,discusses the reproduction of informative function through the translation of terms,proper nouns,as well as long and complicated sentences and the reproduction of operative function through the translation of rhetoric and paratext,and then summarizes the translation strategies and methods of popular science texts.Through the analysis of the cases,the author draws the following conclusions:for the translation of terms,the author chooses their official translations if they have official Chinese names,while if not,the author tries to accurately convey their information through literal translation and annotation.And some common words can also be terms in specific contexts,which should be identified and translated accurately.Just as the translation of terms,for proper nouns,the author translates them with different translation methods according to whether they have official Chinese translations or not.For long and complicated sentences,sometimes it is necessary to adjust sentence structures or add some information to make the translation accurate,fluent,complete and logical so as to ensure the accurate transmission of information.For rhetoric,when translating some well-known allusions or some rhetoric that do not cause ambiguity,literal translation can be adopted to enhance the interest and appeal of the text.But,due to the differences between English and Chinese,sometimes literal translation may cause semantic errors,so free translation can be adopted to translate the rhetoric,and sometimes the function and effect of the text can be reproduced by choosing proper words and expressions.For paratexts,the author chooses appropriate translation methods such as literal translation or additional translation to ensure the achievement of their functions.And sometimes the operative function of the text can also be realized by changing the mood of the sentence.This report shows that text typology theory is of great guiding significance for the translation of popular science texts.Through the analysis of different types of translation problems in the texts,the author hopes that the translation methods summarized in this report can provide some help for popular science text translation,and draw translators’ attention to paratext.