A Report On The Translation Of Extinction: A Very Short Introduction (Chapter Four)

The source text for this translation practice is excerpted from the fourth chapter of the book—Extinction: A Very Short Introduction by Paul B.Wignall.The source text is concise in language and rigorous in content,aiming to disseminate knowledge related to earth science better.It expounds on the causes and nature of mass extinctions and provides a comprehensive summary of all the mass extinction events currently recognized in the field,followed by a description of several major mass extinctions,while also exploring some of the great debates in earth science,such as the relative role of climate change,ocean acidification,or human activity in mass extinctions.Case analysis is conducted to illustrate translation difficulties and corresponding solutions in the report.To improve the quality of the translation,the translator mainly adopted Vinay & Darbelnet’s model of translation procedures,among which various translation techniques were applied to deal with translation difficulties at lexical,syntactical,and textual levels.At the vocabulary level,technical terms,nominalization,pronouns,and words with figurative meanings posed considerable challenges for the translator.A large number of terms related to paleontology and geology could be found in the source text.To ensure the accuracy of the translation,the translator referred to some corpus and parallel texts,and used the compensation strategy(adding footnotes)to further explain the technical terms;nominalization was handled flexibly with the help of transposition(conversion of part of speech)and amplification;pronouns were translated by using explicitation;for words with figurative meanings,the strategy of supplementation was used.At the syntactic level,the source text was characterized by the frequent use of passive voice as well as complex sentences.Under the guidance of the translation techniques listed by Vinay and Darbelnet,modulation of passive and active voice,and modulation of sentence structures were flexibly applied.At the textual level,adding connectives was used to achieve cohesion and coherence in the discourse.Based on the linguistic features of popular science text,this translation practice report summarizes some translation difficulties and provides corresponding solutions under the guidance of Vinay & Darbelnet’s model of translation procedures,with the view of offering some reference for the translation of the same type of texts in the future.