E-C Translation Report Of The Book Of Why:The New Science Of Cause And Effect From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the rapid development of science and technology,the popularization of scientific knowledge is becoming more and more important.Popular science texts(shortened as PST)are a kind of scientific writing which is one of the important vehicles for the public to understand scientific knowledge.Its purpose is to popularize scientific and technical knowledge,advocate scientific methods,disseminate scientific ideas as well as carry forward the scientific spirit.Translation of PST is conducive to promoting international exchanges and spreading scientific knowledge and the further development of science and technology.As for popular science English(shortened as PSE),it is easy to understand,scientific and objective,and is characterized by scientificity,literariness,popularity and appealingness.Therefore,the translation of PSE should be both understandable and acceptable to target readers.The translation standard should be faithfulness and smoothness,easy understandability and correct conveyance of scientific knowledge.Besides,the translation should also be full of interest and gracefulness so that it can suit the reader taste of the target reader.As popularizing scientific knowledge has great influence on modern science and technology,economy and politics,the importance of PSE translation can never be overestimated.The present translator selected the original text(Chapter 2)from The Book of Why:The New Science of Cause and Effect(shortened as The Book of Why)for translation.The book is an introduction to causality,co-authored by Judea Pearl and science writer Mackenzie Dana.Judea Pearl is best known for championing the development of Bayesian network.The book which is of some value in science popularization and innovation is enlightening to the development of science and technology in the era of big data.Thus,it is of some value for translation research.A survey of the studies of PSE translation at home and abroad shows the researches under the guidance of Adaptation Theory are quite inadequate.According to the Adaptation Theory,the use of language can be explained and described from four aspects,including contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes.This paper mainly discusses the present translator's translation from the two aspects of Adaptation Theory,that is,contextual correlates of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability.The paper firstly starts with an introduction to the research background,task profile and significance of the study.And then it gives an illustration of the pre-translation preparation,translation process and post-translation work of the translation practice.After that,the paper focuses on demonstrating the three features of language and four research perspectives of adaptation.Next,in the body part of the paper,the context and linguistic structures in the original text are analyzed,followed by a summary of the translation techniques in combination with specific translation examples for realizing the adaptation to context and linguistic structure.The present study is expected to provide some new insights and methods for the translation of PSE.