On Problems And Solutions Of Popular Science Text Translation

This report is based on the translator's task of translating the selected chapters of the book Reaching the Animal Mind.The book Reaching the Animals Mind is written by Karen Pryor who is a professional animal trainer and had once been employed by the Federal Marine Mammal Commission.To speak of the text type,this book can be classified into popular science book.The author recorded her real experience of using the clicker training method to train animals throughout the years and introduced many ways of communicating with animals effectively and equally to her readers.Besides,professional knowledge concerning ethology and behaviorism is also introduced.Under the background of globalization,the communication between China and foreign countries has made progress in economy and politics.The interaction in science and technology has also been increasingly frequent.Thus,the translation of popular science text has become an important branch in translation activities.The selected chapters for the task and this report is Chapter One Reaching Minds and Chapter Two Shaping.This report takes the skopos theory as the theoretical basis.Through analyzing the three rules of the skopos theory and extending the analysis,the translator herself summarized two main principles in translating popular science text.One is accuracy and the other is interestingness.Under the guidance of these two principles,the handling of word and sentence in popular science text translation are respectively analyzed.The key point of word translation is the selection of word meaning.How to find proper and correct meaning of a word and make accurate judgement of the context the word is in is the most crucial step in selecting word meaning.What's more,literal translation and liberal translation are also adopted in doing word translation.Translation of sentences are classified into translation of simple sentence and translation of compound sentence.By analyzing examples taken from the task,different translation techniques are presented and demonstrated.In the end,the translator herself makes a conclusion,which gives a summary of what she has gained from the process of the task.This report is expected to provide some reference to popular science text translation and research.