Text Analysis Applied To Popular Science Translation

Being a variety of EST (English for Science and Technology), popular science writing plays a more and more crucial role in science popularization. In recent years, a great number of popular science writings, which serve as helpful supplement and guidance of the original ones, have been introduced into China from abroad. Some of the translated versions are really of high quality; however, because of a lack of appropriate guiding theory and specific translation methods, many sentences in the translated versions are illogical and not coherent with each other. After analyzing concrete examples, the author argues that these problems are mainly resulted from the translator's ignorance of the original intention/topic and failure to grasp the logical relationships in the original. Topic/intention and coherence are the research focuses of both rhetoric and text analyze. Thus, the thesis tries to adopt text rhetoric theory to discuss text analysis of popular science writings. Based on the result of analysis, it further explores the translation of popular science writings.The thesis firstly presents the existing problems in its translation and the cause of these problems. The following part contains a brief introduction to text, text analysis and its application to translation. Besides, the two related text rhetoric theories: Louis Trimb's text level rhetoric theory and William C Mann &Sandra A Thompson's rhetoric structure theory, as well as the application of the former theory to EST text analysis and translation are also covered in this part. To solve the existing problems, the thesis proposes a model to analyze popular science writings, that is, to analyze them from the following perspectives: Topic-rhetorical function-rhetorical relation-cohesive devices. Only through grasping the topic can the translator be aware of the original writer's intention; while topic is realized through rhetoric function which in turn is developed by certain rhetoric relations. To ascertain the logical relations in the original, it is necessary to grasp cohesive devices in addition to rhetorical relations. In a word, the translator may get a clear idea of the original topic and logical relations through analyzing popular science writings by adopting the model. The model is mainly based on text level rhetoric theory. However, since the theory is proposed to analyze EST text, the type of rhetorical relations is insufficient while being applied to analyze popular science writings. Consequently, the author turns to rhetoric structure theory while dealing with the rhetorical relations in popular science writings. Finally, translation of popular science writings is carried out based on above analysis. Of the four points, rhetorical relation is very important because it is the embodiment of logical relations in the original.Popular science translation is very important, yet few scholars have addressed on its theoretical exploration. On the other hand, text rhetoric theory is mainly used in EST text analysis and translation and has never been employed in popular science translation. Thus, this thesis is a wholly new attempt and has certain theoretical and practical significance.In the last part, the author states her opinion again and points out the limitations of the thesis and the problems to be further studied.