| Popular science discourse is a variant of scientific discourse, and also a writing style with characteristics of literature and science, which possesses the four features of scientificity,literariness, popularity and interestingness. Popular science discourse style should also be a style distinguishable from scientific discourse style as well as literary discourse style due to its own uniqueness. In the process of translation, the translator needs to select proper translation strategies to reach a similar or even equivalent textual effect and communication effect. The thematic progression patterns reflect the organization structure and the development orientation for the textual information, which not only contributes to the effective generation of the source text for the author, but also is conducive to the interpretation of the target text for the translator.Therefore, it can effectively guide the text translation practice.Based on the present studies on the classification for the thematic progression patterns as well as on the structure characteristics of the original English text and the target Chinese popular science text, the author of this thesis chooses six types of thematic progression patterns and applies them to an analysis of the E-C translation of popular science text on the paragraph and discourse levels, which is done through a case study on A Brief History of Time and through both qualitative and quantative methods. Also, the author analyzes the causes for the alteration of thematic progression patterns in English-Chinese popular science text translation and verifies that in popular science translation practice translators can remain or partly change the original thematic progression patterns so as to achieve equivalence in form and meaning in producing the target text.The study result shows that first, in a study of the paragraph translation, the alteration probability of the thematic progression patterns is higher than expected, and is closely related to the length of the paragraphs. Secondly, in a study of clause groups, the alteration probability of the thematic progression patterns is lower than expected, which indicates to a certain degree that the translator is affected by the original thematic progression patterns as well as his personal inclination in his selection of the translation strategy and purpose. Thirdly, in the E-C translation of popular science texts, there are three types of thematic progression patterns,namely, constant theme pattern, constant rheme pattern as well as simple linear pattern, which are used and transformed more frequently, reflecting to some extent the transformation principle of the E-C translation of popular science texts. |
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