A Report On The Chinese Translation Of Dinosaurs Of Darkness(Second Edition)(Excerpts)

Published in 2020,Dinosaurs of Darkness(Second Edition)is a popular science work written by Thomas H.Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich.As a branch of paleontology,vertebrate paleontology studies ancient animals that have a vertebral column,among which dinosaur fossils occupy an important place.The book describes about the team’s excavations in southeastern Australia and presents the real archaeological work.Under the guidance of Adaptation Theory,this translation report excerpts Foreword to Chapter 2 from Dinosaurs of Darkness(Second Edition).Popular science writing is a type of science and technology works,with an aim to publicize and popularize science and technology knowledge to the public.However,different from general scientific works and reports,popular science texts are usually featured by a variety of easy and plain words.Therefore,in the process of translation,translators manages to adapt to the intra-and extra-linguistic factors of the source text to make the translation both scientific and popular.From this aspect,the principle of popular science translation coincides with the main ideas of Adaptation Theory put forward by Jef Verschueren.Verschueren(1999)stated that the use of language is a process of making choices.Like other communicative activities,translation is also a process of continuous choice-making,and it is in this process that the translator’s adaptability is fully proved.Therefore,according to Adaptation Theory,this report explores the author’s choice-making process in popular science translation from three angles,contextual correlates,structural objects and salience of the adaptation processes.Translation difficulties described in this report mainly include: implied emotions,cultureloaded words and temporal and spatial expressions from the aspect of contextual correlates,prototypical meaning,word order and stylistic equivalence from the aspect of structural objects and animal names and geological terms with different degrees of consciousness.Based on the theory,the author adopts adding,altering and annotation to achieve adaptation in the context.Specification,inversion and unification of styles are applied to realize structural objects of adaptability.For the salience of adaptation processes,deleting and selecting are implemented for the translation of different types of terms.Through the above three levels of research and analysis,this translation practice has verified the effectiveness of Adaptation Theory in guiding popular science translation.It is hoped that this report could provide some reference for translation practice on popular science texts in the future.