| Maintaining health and slowing down aging has long been a hot topic in society.Under the covid-19 pandemic,it is even more important to spread medical knowledge and raise people’s health consciousness.True Age: Cutting-Edge Research to Help Turn Back the Clock is a popular health science book that provides medical knowledge on age and aging and offers advice on diet,exercise and sleep to help slow down aging and maintain good health.Guided by Relevance Theory,the author has chosen chapter two,four and six of the book for her translation practice and study.The report attempts to explore how to reproduce contextual effect at lexical level,reduce processing effort at syntactical level and realize optimal relevance at discourse level in the translation of popular health science texts.The report first introduces the background,significance and profile of the translation task and the structure of the report.Then,the translation process and theoretical basis are illustrated.Based on the Relevance Theory,the major part of the report then analyses some typical cases from the author’s translation practice and explores methods and techniques to translate popular health science texts in three aspects,reproducing contextual effect at lexical level,reducing readers’ processing effort at syntactical level and realizing optimal relevance between target text and target readers at discourse level.The study finds that,at the lexical level,the translation can better reproduce the contextual effect of the original text by selecting the correct translation of medical terms,explicating pronouns and adding explanatory information to cultural-loaded words.At the syntactic level,the translator is advised to restore ellipses,adjust the order of sentences and omit some dashes to help reduce readers’ processing effort.At the discourse level,the translator should make adjustments to the subtitles and cohesive devices and explicate the logical relations implied in the discourse to achieve optimal relevance.It is hoped that this report can provide some useful reference for future research and translation practice of popular health science texts. |
