A Report On Translation Of Climate Confusion(excerpts)

The current frenzy over global warming has concerned the public and cost taxpayers billons of dollars in expenditures for climate research. And yet, despite this dominant and sprawling campaign, the facts behind global warming remain as confounding as ever. The book Climate Confusion, written by Roy Warren Spencer, a distinguished climatologist and scientist, has offered us a distinctive point of view on global warming and exposed the truth behind this global phenomenon.Based on the translation of Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, the author wrote this report. The topic of Chapter 7 is The Politics of Climate Change. It mainly talks about the role of scientists, politicians, the congress and the EPA, and their interrelations, and what attitude shall we take towards “big business”. Chapter 8 is the Dumb Global Warming Solutions. The writer lists the solutions which are regarded as useful by most of the people, but only to be proved dumb at last, and also talked about the little role of UN and the Kyoto Protocol played in controlling global warming.The report first gives an overview of the translation practice. The author with several other classmates formed a translation group and successfully completed the translation task under the guidance of their tutor. During translating, the author found that this book has three distinctive features: first, this book contains strong irony. The writer choose a humorous and ironic way to expose the truth behind global warming; second, there are lots of idiomatic expressions; third, in order to achieve irony and emphasis, the writer prefer to use double negative sentences. Then, the author gave detailed descriptions of the translation strategies. According to the above features and in order to achieve equivalence response from target readers as the original readers, the author decided to adopt Nida’s functional equivalence as theory guidance and laid out corresponded strategies from lexical, syntactic and stylistic level. After finish translation, the author made a conclusion and found that the biggest difficulties in translation are closely associated with its features. So she had to strive to find the equivalent expression in target language to maximize the writer’s intention. Meanwhile, she also realized the importance of Nida’s function equivalence theory.