| Popular scientific writings play a vital role in children’s scientific literacy and interest cultivation.According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development,children of different age groups have different cognitive characteristics and abilities.Therefore,it is of crucial importance to take into account the different cognitive levels of target readers when translating popular scientific writings for children.The series Wow! A Book of Extraordinary Facts is for children aged between 6 and 12.The source text is concise in wording,mainly with simple sentences,but it covers a lot of scientific information,which is not sufficient enough for Chinese children due to their different cultural backgrounds and different ways of thinking.Young readers may have difficulty in reading and understanding if literal translation is adopted.The features of source text and requirements of the publisher should be reflected together in the translation text,which means adding proper scientific explanations and enhancing the readability and interestingness of the text.By applying the strategy of cognition-oriented reconstruction of acceptability and readability,this report analyzes the examples from the aspects of information loading and linguistic manipulation,and summarizes the skills that can be adopted in the translation of popular scientific writings for children.In the aspect of information loading,three skills are mainly adopted: adding Pinyin to the complicated Chinese characters,adding necessary auxiliary elements and creating proper situations based on illustrations while in terms of linguistic manipulation,four skills are mainly applied: humorous and colloquial expressions appropriate to the cognitive level of the target readers,language of dialogical and communicative quality,logical explicitation of information hierarchy as well as conversion between abstraction and concretization.By combining with the feedback of target readers,the readability,knowledge,interestingness,popularity and recognition of the translation have shown a significant improvement,thus meeting the translation requirements of the publisher and the reading needs of the target readers. |
