E-C Translation Of Climate Change:Evidence,Impacts And Choices And A Critical Commentary

Climate Change:Evidence, Impacts, and Choices is a booklet prepared by the National Research Council to provide answers to common questions about the science of climate change. It was published on December31st,2012by the National Academies Press. The second edition came out in2013and it was selected for this project. This booklet is made up of13,359words and over30figures, boxes and tables. First, it explains to readers that human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are responsible for much of the warming and related changes being observed around the world. Second, it summarizes projections of future climate changes and impacts expected in this century and beyond. Finally, the booklet examines how science can help inform choices about managing and reducing the risks posed by climate change.Socially, this book differs from most of the relevant books in China in that it does not directly tell what is the evidence about climate change, or the projections of future climate change and impacts; instead, it explains to readers how the evidence is collected and how scientists project future climate change accordingly. Therefore, the translation of this book makes the science of climate change readily accessible to Chinese readers, both laypeople and people with scientific training. Academically, solutions to the problems found in this translation project will benefit other translators and laymen alike. The translation of this book proves to be quite challenging due to lexical traps at the lexical level, long and complex sentences at the syntactic level and the maintenance of unity at the formal level. Due to the differences between English and Chinese, these problems are also typical ones that have long perplexed translators as well as laymen. In the report, I not only attempt to explain what the solutions are, but also why and how in detail so that the solutions may be of some use for other translators:when facing the same problems, they may adopt the approaches directly or may be inspired by the report and find their own solutions.The report consists of three parts. The first part introduces the original text, the significance and difficulties of the project. The second part discusses solutions to the three major problems:1) semantic extension---a solution to lexical traps,2) division and reconstruction---a solution to long and complex sentences, and3) parallel structures---a way to maintain unity. The third part summarizes the report.