Researching The Strategy Of Domestication In English-Chinese Translation Of Popular Science Materials

With the progress of science and technology, China needs an ever-increasing number oftalents with cutting-edge professional knowledge and higher educational level. Due to thelimitation of China’s education, students must have the ability of self-improvement and viewlearning as their lifelong cause. Popular science materials, an important supplement of schooleducation, function as an effective mean in advancing students’ science and culturalknowledge. However, China’s domestic popular science materials cannot meet the need of thehuge number of readers. As a result, translation of overseas popular science materialsbecomes more and more important.Unfortunately, many harsh quality problems can be found in most works of translation.Majority of unintelligible translated texts and errors lead to the failure of spreading scientificknowledge. Based on the research of the third chapter of a brief history of time written byStephen Hawking and its Chinese version by XU Mingxian and WU Zhongchao, theconclusion can be drawn that it is the misunderstanding of the original text and the overuse offoreignizing translation that cause the poor quality of the version.Both foreignizing and domesticating are translation strategies. Different as they are, theyboast dialectical unity. According to skopostheory and functional equivalence theory, sincemost advanced popular science works mainly act as spreading scientific knowledge and thetranslations aim at high-grade Chinese students, translators should mainly adoptdomestication strategy. This thesis gave a detailed analysis of the Chinese version by XUMingxian and WU Zhongchao of the third chapter of a brief history of time, corrected itserrors and translated it again.