A Report On E-C Translation Of Burning Up-A Global History Of Fossil Fuel Consumption (Excerpts)

This report is based on the translation practice of Burning up-A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption(Excerpts),focusing on the E-C translation of abstract nouns in popular science text.As an informative text,the main function of a popular science text is to provide data,definitions,descriptions of phenomena or details about a fact.With its precise,formal and objective linguistic style,the popular science text has strong logical connections among the lines and is filled with abstract diction.Abstract nouns frequently appear in the popular science text for their high degree of generality and flexibility.Nevertheless,the linguistic differences between Chinese and English bring challenges to translation due to the vocabulary vacancy of abstract nouns in Chinese.To deal with this problem when translating the selected text,the author studied relevant articles and then produced this report,and the main contents of which are summarized as follows:The same abstract noun is translated with different strategies in different contexts.Literal translation is the preferred option.If the literal translation cannot fully convey the meaning of the original text,other strategies should be adopted for the particular situation.For the abstract nouns which cannot be translated literally,the author divided them into four categories in the report based on their origins and their meaning in the context: those converted from verbs or adjectives and showing the meaning of an action or the attribute of something or the manner of an action in the context;those referring to nature or status of something in the context;those representing specific objections or meaning in the context;those abstract nouns modified by an adjective can be converted into an abstract noun.Under the guidance of the Functional Equivalence Theory,and also taking into account the features of the text,the author offered four translation techniques:conversion,addition of category words,specification and omission.Conversion,addition of category words and omission can be used for the translation of abstract nouns without any extended meaning in the context,and specification should be used for translation of abstract nouns with extended meaning in the context.