A Report On The Translation Of English Medical News Under The Guidance Of Skopos Theory

The source text is a collection of five medical news reports in 2020 extracted from Nature,the world’s leading science journal.These reports focus on COVID-19,involving the fatality rate,potential drugs and vaccine research programs.Hence they can help readers gain in-depth knowledge of the pandemic from various perspectives.The source text,intended to spread information on the pandemic,can be classified to the informative text.In terms of linguistic characteristics,the source text is featured by rigorousness,objectiveness and compactness: medical terms and proper nouns are commonly mentioned;sentences with inanimate subjects and direct speech are frequently employed;and transitional words are rarely used.Therefore,the translation of medical terms,sentences with inanimate subjects,and realization of discourse coherence constitute the difficulties in the translation process.The difficulties require the translator to breach the form of the source text for readability.Accordingly,“Skopos theory” proposed by German functionalism focuses on translation purposes without sticking to original texts,by which the expected purposes of the translation project can be realized to the greatest extent.Thus Skopos theory has guiding significance for this translation practice.Therefore,with the guidance of Skopos theory,the translator employs three rules(the skopos rule,coherence rule,and fidelity rule)to solve the difficulties.Specifically,at the lexical level,the translator deals with medical terms by referring to journals,databases and parallel texts;at the syntactic level,the translator translates sentences with inanimate subjects by transforming inanimate subjects into objects,predicates,adverbials,or processing this kind of sentences into inanimate sentences;and at the discourse level,the translator employs translation techniques of repetition,addition,combination,and concretization to achieve discourse coherence.This project aims to provide the public with instant and reliable information by focusing on the latest developments of COVID-19.Meanwhile,this report seeks to provide valuable enlightenment for translators to solve similar problems through exploring translation skills in medical terms,sentences with inanimate subjects,and discourse coherence.