Rhetoric In Popular Science Translation

With the rapid development of science and technology, popular science books arebecoming increasingly important in disseminating new information and ideas toscientists as well as common people. Most of the popular science works nowadays arewritten in English. In China, readers mainly get access to such works throughtranslation.Accordingly, this report attempts to work out an outline to study the rhetoric inpopular science translation and focuses on the two Chinese versions (one by LiShaoming, the other by the writer of this report) of The Medusa and the Snail writtenby Lewis Thomas through a corpus-based approach. In this report, the author will firstelaborate the creation of a corpus, retrieval, data collection and analysis, then thecomparison of the two translations will be unfolded on the basis of the statistics ofwords (average word length, readability, word frequency, personal pronouns, etc.) andsyntax (average sentence length, passive sentence and concordance). Combined withthe quality of being scientific, the rhetoric value, comprehensibility andinterestingness of popular science translation, the author will adopt the method ofquantitative and qualitative analysis to discuss the differences between the twoversions comprehensively. Meanwhile, the report cites a large number of examples toreflect the necessity and importance of corpus tools to the study of rhetoric in popularscience translation.The report is a preliminary study of the corpus-based comparison of the twotranslations, aimed at establishing a corpus-based translation analysis mode andstudying translation at various levels and in diverse perspectives. It provides MTIstudents, and professional and amateur translators with a reference, which will help usto gain benefits from excellent translated works more effectively, and provides helpfor popular science translation practice in the future.