A Report On The English-Chinese Translation Of Understanding Energy Innovation:Learning From Smart Grid Experiments(Chapter 1-2)

Under the guidance of Andrew Chesterman’s theory of translation norms,the translator describes the whole process of the translation of a scientific text focusing on energy innovation,and shows her reflection on the theory in the translation report.The source text is from Heather Lovell’s new book Understanding Energy Innovation: Learning from Smart Grid Experiments.The translator selects a total of about 11,000 words from the book.Published in January 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan,there is currently no Chinese translation and the translator has obtained permission from the author to translated it into Chinese.As a scientific book that introduces energy innovation,the selected text contains many professional expressions in the field of electricity.Thus the translator should not only conform to the clear and concise style of the source text,but also shows the professionalism of the source text when translating these words and phrases.Therefore,the translator decides to adopt Andrew Chesterman’s theory of translation norms to analyses the translation problems in the translation of chapters one and chapter two of this book.The report consists of five parts.The first part gives the background to this translation practice.To be more specifically,the translator introduces the contents of the source text and the author of this book,and analyzes in detail the significance of translating the book in this section.The second part describes the entire translation process,which includes three stages,namely pre-translation,while-translation and post-translation.The third part introduces Andrew Chesterman’s theory of translation norms,which guides the translator to accomplish the translation task throughout the translation process.Besides,the translator also summarizes the research results of translation norms both inside and outside of China,and analyzes the reasons for choosing this theory to guide her translation practice.The fourth part is the most critical part of the translation report.In this part,the translator selects sixteen cases from the translation material,divides them into three aspects: syntactic level,semantic level and pragmatic level,and analyzes these cases with the guidance of translation norms.Part five concludes the translation report,in which the translator points out the limitations of the report and the major findings of the translator.In the process of this translation practice,the translator adopts translation strategies such as level shift,conversion of the part of speech,sentence structure change,distribution change,abstraction change,the change of translators’ visibility to improve the readability and professionalism of the translated text.The translation practice proves the practicality of applying Andrew Chesterman’s theory to the translation of scientific and technical texts.Besides,It provides a reference for the future research or practice in combining the theory of translation norms and technical texts.