A Report On Translation Of A History Of Energy Flows: From Human Labor To Renewable Power (Chapter 3)

Energy plays an important role in people’s lives and the country’s development.The source text of this translation practice is selected from the book named A History of Energy Flows: From Human Labor to Renewable Power,an energy science and technology text published in 2020.This kind of text aims to provide readers with objective information about energy.The communicative translation theory values readers’ reading experiences.Taking the communicative translation theory as the guiding theory is conducive to improving the translation quality of energy science and technology texts.Based on the analysis of the source text’s linguistic features,this translation practice applies Peter Newmark’s communicative translation theory to the translation of energy science and technology texts.Then,problems encountered in the translation process and their corresponding translation techniques are summarized at the lexical,syntactic,and discourse levels.Major findings are as follows: at the lexical level,adding parenthetical notes,conversion of part of speech,and contextual analysis are adopted to deal with the translation of units of measurement,nominalized words,and polysemy.At the syntactic level,translation techniques such as converting the passive voice into the active voice,preposition,division,and cutting are used to translate the passive voice,attributive clauses,and long and complicated sentences.At the discourse level,repetition,omission,explicitation,and adjustment of sentence order are applied to ensure cohesion and coherence.Meanwhile,in the translation process,the translator notices three kinds of errors in the source text,which are spelling mistakes,grammatical errors,and errors in content.Corrections are made in the translated version and footnotes are added as well.