A Report On The Translation Of The American People (Brief Fourth Edition)

The point of this report is the translation of popular science books. With the development of our society and the improvements in the living standards among the people, the general public is not just after material satisfaction but also a higher degree of cultural appreciation. This has resulted in a growing demand for more popular science books to cater for the needs of the people to expand their scope of learning. As we are getting more exposed to an increasingly interrelated world, the desire is becoming stronger to be able to have access to popular science books from other countries. In order to have a better understanding of the society, culture and history of a nation, quite often we need to read the writings by the native authors. However, sometimes only books wrote by a native people can be really original. Yet, translators in this country would inevitably encounter the problem of where to put their focus on amid the piles of publications of a given nation, as until recently there has been very limited work done in this area. This is the main point of this report.In order to do this research, I translated about15000words of The American People (Brief Fourth Edition) into Chinese. This edition has never been translated before. On that basis, I analysis this translation practice in detail starting with the characteristics of popular science translation under the guidance of translation theories such as "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance" of Mr. Yanfu and functional equivalence theory of Eugene Nida. Besides, I use the paraphrase as the main translation strategy. By analyzing the translation of message gropes, sentences and words, this report discussed how to use various translation methods and skills to make the target text satisfying. The ways of tackling with the culture-loaded words is also discussed in the report. In addition, I concluded some experience through this translation practice, including the qualifications a popular science translator should has; how to schedule the work process appropriately and some tips of doing translation. I really hope these could offer help to the readers.Nowadays the analysis of the popular science translation is still at a rudimentary state. Although some scholars have done some work on it, the popular science translation is still not a importance subject compared with literary translation or legal translation etc. Therefore, this report has a certain degree of innovation using the popular science translation as an entry point and I hope this report could make humble contributions for this area in the future.