A Report On E-C Translation Of The Excerpts From Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh And The Future Of Food

With the increasing development of the research of cell culture meat,the related discussions become hot in many countries and people are looking forward to knowing more about the cultured meat and its related field.This thesis takes Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food as translation material.As a social science text,the book is a writing about the first cultivated beef burger with a historical review of meat.The aim of the original text is to convey information to readers,so information transmission should be the target of the translation.Guided by Information Theory,this thesis discusses the translation strategies in the translation of social-science texts with informative functions,based on the E-C translation of an excerpt of Meat Planet.As a book about food technology,the text of Meat Planet is highly specialized with a large number of technical terms in both natural science and social science,covering different subjects such as cell biology,food science and technology,anthropology and sociology.So,how to handle these terms is a focus of the translation.Besides,in transferring the scientific information as well as his personal ideas the author uses various types of metaphors to interpret the complex concepts and vividly describe the state of things,which makes a distinctive style of the original text,so the handling of metaphors is another major concern for the translation at the lexical level.As to the term translation,we use both “conventionality” principle and creative translation to ensure the accurate decoding and scientific recoding of terms.“Conventionality” means finding the accurate definition of the terms by looking them up meticulously in such literature as Chinese Technical Terms and authoritative monographs and web pages,then just use the Chinese term in the translation.If there is no popular usage or standard translation,the translator should “create” the definition by dividing the terms into different parts,and doing a creative recoding on the basis of scientific decoding according to the naming principle of terms.When translating the metaphors,we keep them in the translation text if information in the vehicle of the metaphor is clear;and we supplement the metaphorical information for those overloaded vehicles so as to make manifest the link between the tenor and the vehicleIn the light of Information Theory,this translation practice hopes to achieve effective cross-language information correspondence and transmission,and at the same time ensure the scientific nature and preserve the style of original text.In summarizing the solutions to some specific questions,this translation report hopes some common strategies can be used for the translation of similar social-science texts.