On Popular Science Translation From The Perspective Of Interpretive Theory

Scientific and technological activity is a human activity. As the top priority in thesocial development and globalization, the dissemination of scientific and technologicalknowledge and improvement of the people understandings of science are extremelyimportant parts in national strategic development. Popular science reading is the mosteffective means of this session, as well as an important vehicle carrying scienceeducation to the broad mass. Ever since the1950s, in order to increase the scientificawareness of civil people, who had no idea of science then, a large number ofoutstanding foreign popular science readings and publications have been introducedgovernmentally into the domestic market by the means of translating. However, due tothe particularity for the style of popular science works, the related translation study hadbeen at a peripheral place, and didn’t get full attentions from linguistic and translationacademic fields at home and abroad. The translation practice needs the enlightenmentof expertise from science and technology field. In order to provide scientific translationwith new theories and methods, under the framework of Lederer Interpretive Theory,the author will study the process of translation for the popular science readings. Thispaper aims at proving effectiveness in conducting efforts of the Interpretive Theory.This paper chooses Interpretive theory of translation as the research tool. Thistheory treats the translation as a verbal communication, which needs both sides haveequal language knowledge and cognitive knowledge.The translating objects of popularscience writings include language, information and knowledge, especially the last one.Thus, we can see the operability of Interpretive theory on popular science translation.Firstly, this paper will make a detailed introduction of Interpretive theory.Secondly, the relationship between the language and meaning of popular sciencereadings will be explored. Third part deals with popular science translation processresearch. Interpretive Theory’s most impressive innovation is adding an"de-verbalization" in between the understanding and expressing on the sense of traditional idea, and this innovative action has received the confirm from psychologyand cognitive psychology. This article will focus on translator’s encyclopedicknowledge and cognitive complement play the role in this stage. And starting from thispoint, the author is to explore the formation of translator creativity in this process.Under the guidance of the Interpretive Theory, the last part of this paper continueexplore the “balance” and its full-scale performances in translating progress, anddiscuss “faithfulness” from this new angle.The translating scale for popular science is very considerable, but its translationtheory studies have always been put in a marginal situation. Thus, it is very urgent forus to find a applicable theory for the popular science translation.