The Naked Future (excerpt) Translation Practice Report

With the progress and rapid development of science and technology, popular science books are playing an important role in popularizing scientific knowledge, promoting science and technology, advocating new scientific methods and spreading scientific ideology. The introduction and translation of popular science English have important meanings to boom the creation of popular science in our country and carry forward scientific spirits. Linguistic Adaptation Theory is the core of Verschueren's pragmatic perspective theory. He believes that the use of language is a continuous process of selection. Translation itself is a kind of linguistic selection which meets different objectives of language communications, choices exist in every aspects, from what to translate to how to translate, from texts, translation strategies and techniques to sentence patterns, vocabulary, emotional meanings and so on. So, the author thinks that Linguistic Adaptation Theory has strong explanatory power for the translation of popular science English.This article is a translation practice report in which the author has chosen the introduction and chapter 7 in The Naked Future as her subject of translation. According to the language features of popular science English and Linguistic Adaptation Theory, the author has discussed the guidance of contextual correlates of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability to scientific English translation. The author accepted the translation strategy of dynamic adaptation and used some translation techniques such as splitting, free translation, amplification and sentence reconstruction to ensure the exactness and fluency of translation. Through this practice,the author found that only making dynamic adaptation between source language and target language from the two aspects of context and linguistic structure can achieve the purpose of smooth communication.