A Report On The Translation Of Foods That Changed History:How Foods Shaped Civilization From The Ancient World To The Present(Excerpts)—On Translating Popular Science Texts

This is a report on the English-Chinese translation of a popular science text,aiming to probe into the translation criteria and techniques for translating popular science texts and reinvigorate efforts to combine theory with practice.In the era of information and technology,popular science texts have emerged as one of the bestselling publications,in China,most of popular science texts are translations,especially from English speaking countries.However,the translation of popular science texts in China is under-researched.Few papers provide translation criteria and methods to guide the translation of popular science text,resulting in unsatisfactory translation.Based on the translation of popular science encyclopedia Foods That Changed History:How Foods Shaped Civilization from the Ancient World to the Present,this report carries out a detailed discussion on the translation criteria of popular science texts under the guidance of Peter Newmark's translation theory,exploring translation techniques to fulfill these criteria.Chapter One offers an introduction,covering the research background,the brief introduction to the source text and the author,and process description.Chapter Two presents the source text and the target text.Chapter Three elaborates on popular science texts and analyzes the specific features of the source text.Chapter Four is theoretical framework.Newmark's text typology and communicative translation are discussed in this chapter.And then the translation criteria of popular science texts proposed by Wang Zhenping,that's,to be accurate,to be popular and idiomatic,and to be literary are analyzed under the guidance of Newmark's translation theory.Chapter Five is the case study.Translation techniques adopted to fulfill the three criteria are presented in this chapter.In order to be accurate,the author of this report focuses on the translation of proper names,technical terms and polysemants.Conversion,interpretating and rewriting are adopted as an attempt to be popular and idiomatic.Four-character expressions and rhetoric techniques are applied to ensure the literariness of the TT.The last chapter is the conclusion,including gains and lessons,limitations,and suggestions for future study.