A Report On The Translation Of The Popular Science Book 30 Animals That Made US Smarter

As a means of exchanging ideas regarding science and technology,popular science texts could spread relevant knowledge to the masses and enhance their scientific literacy.Considering that the majority of popular science texts are translated from foreign works,it is particularly significant to upgrade the translation quality of popular science texts.Selecting the popular science book 30 Animals That Made Us Smarter as the analysis material of this report,the translator with Translation Shift Theory served as the theoretical framework explores how to apply level shifts and category shifts to improve translation quality.This report finds that translators following the Translation Shift Theory could break free from formal constraints and overcome the translation difficulties caused by differences between English and Chinese languages so that the demotic feature of popular science texts could be reproduced in the target language.In this report,the translator expounds how to apply various types of shifts to guide popular science translation: From the perspective of level shifts,tenses and plural nouns in English could be replaced with lexical means in Chinese so that the implied meaning carried by the grammatical markers could be expressed.With the help of structure shifts,the considerable passive voices in popular science English could be turned into active voices,which will make the translation more in line with language habits of target readers.Intractable parts of speech could be handled under the guidance of class shifts,which could improve the readability of the translation.Following the unit shifts,the translator could segment one complex sentence in English into several Chinese clauses,producing a smoother translation.By conducting intra-system shifts,translation difficulties caused by highly contextualized terms could be overcome and a faithful translated version will be ensured.