A Report On The Translation Of How Innovation Works And Why It Flourishes In Freedom(Excerpts)

This practical report is based on the translation of excerpts from the book How Innovation Works and Why It Flourishes in Freedom by British writer Matt Ridley.The book is divided into12 chapters,which describes the development process of innovation to readers from different fields.The translator selected the first chapter for translation and analysis.This chapter mainly introduces the development of energy innovation.This is a popular science text,which has the characteristics of both scientific and literary texts.This translation practice is based on the three standards of popular science translation put forward by Guo Jianzhong,“be loyal to the original intention;ensure smoothness;be easy to understand”.Based on these three standards,the translator chose skopos theory as her guiding theory for this translation task.According to the linguistic features of popular science text,the translator focused on the translation of terms,passive constructions and rhetorical devices in selected text.After summarizing the two methods(free translation and transliteration),the translator also proposed that terms in popular science texts should be easy to understand and embody its scientificity,so the translation of terms should also conform to the characteristics of disciplines and annotation can be used in due course.There are a large number of passive constructions in the source text,which are the key and difficult points in the translation task.So the translator analyzed and summarized the translation techniques of passive constructions,which can be divided into two: translation into Chinese passive voice,translation into Chinese active voice(translation into active sentence with the agent to be the subject,translation into non-subject sentence,translation into the pattern of“是……的”and translation into an active sentence by adding subject).Popular science texts have literary characteristics,and meanwhile rhetorical devices are used many times in the selected text,so the translator analyzed the translation of parallelism,simile and metaphor(animals are used as vehicles)in this text.The translator mainly adopted three translation methods or techniques: literal translation,amplification and annotation.This report is of certain value to the translation of popular science text.However,the translation techniques written in this report are concluded from the selected text,so there are some limitations.