On The E-C Translation Of Popular Scientific Articles From The Perspective Of Text Typology Theory

Popular scientific articles are one of the most important media to disseminate the latest development of scientific researches. In an era of globalization, translation of scientific popular articles helps spread the achievements of scientific researches around the world and plays a very significant role in promoting the advancement of science and technology of all countries and their economic development.This thesis, with Katharina Reiss’ s Text Typology as its theoretical guidance and the E-C translation of Scientific American as its research object, analyzes the linguistic features and text types of scientific popular articles so as to explore feasible methods for their translation. It claims that translators should determine translation principles on the purpose of reproducing the content and the main linguistic functions, and then apply translation methods like literal translation, addition, reconstruction, etc. effectively and appropriately to the translation of popular scientific articles.The thesis first gives a brief account of the studies made by scholars in recent years about the translation of scientific popular articles, pointing out that they focus on the analysis of the style and linguistic features of popular scientific articles as well as the principles, criteria, strategies and methods for their translation. Then, it introduces Reiss’ s Text Typology and his classification of three text types. Reiss, in accordance with the language function theory raised by Karl Bühler, divides texts into three types, namely, informative, expressive and appellative, and elaborates the linguistic features and language functions of each text type as well as the translation methods applied to them. After that, it expounds their text types and analyzes the linguistic features of English popular scientific articles including Scientific American. As regards text type, English popular scientific articles belong to the informative text with some features of the appellative one. Thus, they focus on transmitting information and at the same time express some appealing functions. And they are characterized by a large number of professional words and terms, clear and logical organization of sentences and proper use of rhetorical devices and direct speeches. Having these linguistic features and text types in view and taking Scientific American as a case study, the thesis explores and summarizes the principles and methods for the E-C translation of popular scientific articles from the perspective of text typology theory. It maintains that the adoption of translation methods like literal translation, addition, reconstruction and so on can help give accurate reproduction of the content of source text and effectively represent the original effect of expressions.