The Chinese-to-English Translation Of Popular Science Books For Teenagers From The Perspective Of Stylistic Markers Theory ——A Case Study Of Chinese Historical Geography For Teenagers

Chinese Historical Geography for Teenagers has been recommended by the Wenjin Award committee to young people.It is a popular science book on Chinese historical geography for teenagers.As it focuses on Chinese historical geography,a specialized interdisciplinary subject that is seldom seen in the market,its English translation can narrow the market gap and spread Chinese culture of historical geography among foreign teenagers.The most distinctive text feature of the book is also the greatest challenge of its translation,namely its mixed and various styles.The translator selected the third chapter of this book as the translation material and adopted Liu Miqing’s Stylistic Markers Theory as a tool to analyze the style translation of the book.According to Liu Miqing,style is recognizable and translatable.The style translation is based on stylistic markers,which are divided into formal markers and non-formal markers.In this report,the formal markers are register markers,syntactic markers,textual markers and markers of figures of speech;the non-formal markers are the work’s intrinsic qualities and the receptor’s fusion of horizons.The translator finds that the analysis of stylistic markers can help translators identify the ST style effectively and efficiently and thus better prepare translators for style translation.The theory also proposes three translation strategies:corresponding,recasting and decoloring.Through the translation practice and analysis,the translator finds that in this Chinese-to-English translation of popular science books for teenagers,the most frequently used strategy is recasting,which is commonly applied in the Chinese cultural-loaded register markers.Eighteen techniques are employed in this report to recast the ST style.Among them,transliteration and literal translation plus addition/annotation are the most common ones.The decoloring strategy is realized by ten techniques,among which substituent conversion and paraphrasing are exercised more often.Paralleling conversion and literal translation among seven techniques mostly embody the corresponding strategy.