A Report On The E-C Translation Of The Story Of Life: Great Discoveries In Biology(Excerpts)

This translation practice report is based on the supervisor’s translation project of a popular biology book,The Story of Life: Great Discoveries in Biology by Sean B.Carroll,an American biology professor.This book focuses on major discoveries in biology and the stories of famous biologists.The translator selected the fifth part of the book as the source text for the translation practice report which focuses on the popularity and scientific nature of the translation in order to make the translation more accurate and popular.The translator uses the Yi CAT online computer-aided translation platform and the Medical English Online Translation Dictionary(Let Pub)when translating the text to ensure the accuracy of the popular science translation and to improve the quality of the translation.Peter Newmark’s Communicative Translation Theory requires the translator to put the target language readers at the center of the translation process.The translation should not only convey the information of the original text,but also use expressions that are in line with the reading habits of the readers.Based on the Communicative Translation Theory,this report analyses how to make the effect of the translation closer to the original work and how to make the target language readers obtain a similar reading impression to that of the source language readers by combining three levels of words,sentences and texts with specific cases,so as to achieve the purpose of communicative translation.At the lexical level,the translator uses four-character structures and part-of-speech conversion to focus on the faithfulness and accuracy of the translation.At the syntactic level,the translator uses methods such as adjusting the order of words and expanding short sentences to make the translation more fluent and smooth according to the syntactic structure differences between Chinese and English.From the perspective of discourse,based on the differences in writing habits between Chinese and English and the characteristics of the text,the translator uses linear translation and the addition of conjunctions to achieve a fluent and natural translation that meets the readers’ reading requirements.The translator hopes that this translation practice report can provide some useful value for the translation and research of other biological science texts.