A Practical Report On The Translation Of Scientific American Excerpts From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the economic globalization and the arrival of the era of knowledge-driven economy,Competition is aggravating in the world,as well as the rapid development of high technology,the demand for understanding science and technology and learning of people is increasing day by day.Therefore,a large number of scientific literatures and popular science articles need to be translated.Because of the uniqueness of science and technology translation:accuracy,faithfulness,coherence and conciseness.Correspondingly,the translator should be of high quality.The translator should not only have comprehensive and solid background knowledge of the specialized background information,but also the translator needs to fully master two or more languages,and to specialize in theoretical knowledge.The translator has selected some articles from Scientific American as the source texts to translate.Journals of popular science in America have played an extraordinary role in dissemination of information and guidance,and also in improving national scientific and technological quality and popularizing,spreading new technology and knowledge.And the Scientific American is an outstanding one among them.Scientific American is a ime-honored magazine which was founded by Rufus Porter an inventor and publisher in 1845.It is now the longest running magazine in the United States.Through the translation of Scientific American,the translator hopes that the advanced science and technology in western countries can be learned by the public and promote the awareness of popular science among the public as well as strengthen people's understanding of science and technology.To make everything go smoothly,the translator needs to use relevant theory to translate popular science articles.Among them,the relevance theory is a cognitive pragmatics theory which has great influence in recent years.Relevance theory holds that the whole process of discourse is the process of osensive inferential process.It can provide powerful explanations for scientific translation and guide the translation practice of science and technology.Under the guidance of the relevance theory,the translator can find the optimal relevance through the connection between the original text,the context and the translation,so that the target language readers can have nearly the sanme understanding of the article as the original readers.This report is a translation of excerpts from Scientific American under the guidance of relevance theory.The strategies of translation are mainly from two aspects:vocabularies and sentences.The translation methods in terms of vocabulary are:to translate neologisms according to the basic meaning of words,and to translate new words according to the background of the article.The translation methods of syntax are:according to the sentence structure,including amplification,conversion,and the use of active and negative voices,and so on,to find the best translation that is the optimal relevance;to choose the most suitable translation sentences in the circumstances of the cognitive context of the target language reader.