Translation Of Popular Science English From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Popular science text, as a variant of sci-tech writings, features a combination of literature and science, which aims to popularize and diffuse scientific knowledge in vivid, concise and plain language. With the vigorous growth of popular science translation, scholars have found out that mistranslation has been a big problem that needs to be solved. Although relevant studies have been conducted in this field in recent years, most of them stress the accuracy of translation instead of translation theories and strategies. In order to make up the deficiency and inefficiency, the author of this paper attempts to study popular science translation from the perspective of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory to meet the urgent need in this aspect.The study aims to analyze the value of Functional Equivalence Theory to popular science translation. The theory attaches great importance to readers' responses—the readers of the target text should be able to appreciate the text concerned in essentially the same manner as the original readers do. It can be regarded as a novel yardstick to evaluate popular science translation. The thesis mainly focuses on dealing with the following issues: 1) whether it is viable to involve Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory into the study of popular science translation; 2) how Functional Equivalence Theory works in popular science translation; 3) what translation principles can be concluded from the perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory.This thesis starts with a brief introduction to the book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth and a general account of research questions, objectives, methodologies and the structure of the thesis. Then, it presents the literature review and theoretical basis: firstly, the brief overview of the history of the theory; secondly, the illustration of the main content; thirdly, the significance of Functional Equivalence Theory to the translation of popular science text. Based on Functional Equivalence Theory, the main body of the thesis conducts the contrast and analysis of two Chinese versions of An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth in terms of meaning and style, the former of which consists of three aspects—lexical meaning, grammatical meaning and rhetorical meaning; the analysis of the latter is also made from three levels—lexical, syntactic and discourse level. The last part presents significant findings and limitations.