A Report On English-Chinese Translation Of Grunt:the Curious Science Of Humans At War (Excerpts)

With the rapid development of science and technology in the 21st century,many foreign popular science works have been introduced into China,and the demand for the translation of popular science books is also increasing.Popular science books not only possess the scientific and informative characteristics of scientific and technological texts,but also enjoy the literary,popular,and interesting features of literary texts,putting forward higher requirements for the translation quality of popular science books.The translation practice material for this report is derived from the first five chapters of the book Grunt:The Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach.The book is a popular science work in the military field,exploring military-related scientific research and how science can be used to save soldiers’ lives on modern battlefields in concise and humorous language.Therefore,the report chooses Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory to guide the whole translation practice,abandoning "formal correspondence" and emphasizing "textual equivalence".Level shifts and category shifts are the two types of translation shifts.The former focuses on lexis and grammar,while the latter can be divided into structure shifts,class shifts,unit shifts,and intrasystem shifts.Based on specific cases,this report discusses the application and guiding significance of the Translation Shifts Theory in practice.Through the research and analysis,this report realises that when translating popular science texts,translators are recommended to flexibly use the Translation Shifts Theory to actively solve the problems of levels and categories,to make the target language more fluent,coherent,and authentic.At the same time,this report summarises different translation strategies,hoping to provide some references for future translation practice.