本文是一篇英语毕业论文，本文得出，功能对等要在突出文风特色的同时，保证“用量对等”的恰到好处，既要体现于宏观风格的方方面面，又不能忽视细枝末节的内在逻辑、刻画描述与承接连贯。
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Introduction to the Background
This section provides the background of the project first to explain the choice of the project and then discusses The Wind-Riding Seeds to unveil the relevance between the book and the background. What follow are an account of the social background, the new trend of popular science, an introduction to The Wind-Riding Seeds, and the significance of the study.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, scientific and technological innovation has been placed in a prominent position, which offers good development opportunities to popular science. Popular science is transforming. On the one hand, the global sci-technological revolution and industrial transformation have continuously accelerated the in-depth coordination of science and technology with economy, society, culture, and ecology; on the other hand, the arrival of the fast-reading era cultivates the impatient reader with higher expectations of books. Popular science is embarking on an interest-oriented path (Xu & Guo, 2012), namely, “soft popular science”, which shifts the focus from solely knowledge-concentrated to the dual center of both scientific and artistic considerations. Language expression layers are blending, mixing scientific contents with literary elements, and popular science is hence with more plain and approachable narration. (Yao, 2021) The Wind-Riding Seeds is a representative example of soft popular science, and it perfectly fits the characteristic mentioned above.
1.2 Analysis of the Source Text
The Wind-Riding Seeds is written in an era of interdisciplinarity. When the feature is reflected in popular science, soft popular science emerges with a characteristic of combining science with literary taste. Cui Huawei, a member of the China Popular Science Writers Association, tried on writing one in this context, and the book is The Wind-Riding Seeds. The Wind-Riding Seeds is composed of independent short compositions, and science-related stories are told expressively. Imaginable, the knowledge of the book is not as intensive as the traditional popular science, but it is more humanitarian as it is with the author’s self-experience with the seeds and plants and his own feelings towards them. Therefore, the book is of both scientific features and literary features. Besides, there is another feature—loose feature, and the three features will be elaborated as follows.
First, the scientific feature. Clear and effective communication is a main feature of The Wind-Riding Seeds. Aiming at popularizing seed’s knowledge, accuracy and no miscarriage of information are of immense importance as not to wrongfully lead the reader on the one hand and appears to be trustworthy and professional on the other hand. The Wind-Riding Seeds teems with terminologies when it describes the compositions of seeds and flowers, and some seemingly literary descriptions also have fixed terms, and they all need to be rendered scientifically.
Second, the literary feature. The Wind-Riding Seeds attaches significant importance to humanistic knowledge, aiming at integrating stories with scientific knowledge and pursuing the unity of science and humanity. A myriad of lively descriptions of the seeds and beautiful scenery needs to be rendered there, and failing to do that will tarnish the charm of the book. Following the thinking, an implication of using pragmatic markers emerges, but not to be applied everywhere, as marker also possesses acceptability principle (Liu, 1990). Some phrases in The Wind-Riding Seeds are cited from Chinses classical literature. Though it does attach the text with a literary touch, there is no use translating it into Old English, as it may undermine the popularity of the book. To summarize, when translating lively descriptions, the artistic characteristics of the source text should be maintained to bring the reader similar feelings as the original one; when translating classical literature, no Old English and add supplementing information when it is necessary, for in doing so, the reader can better understand the translation.
Chapter 2 Translation Process
2.1 Pre-Translation
Preparation makes ease. The pre-translation work is arranged in time order. The source text is first analyzed to form a basic understanding of the book. Then translation tools are selected as the last step before translation.
2.1.1 Selection of Parallel Texts
The translator should be with a background knowledge of the to-be-translated text. The Wind-Riding Seeds is a relatively unfamiliar field, fraught with terms or other academic descriptions of botany which is out of the profession and knowledge of the translator and the reader if one does not happen to be an amateur or even an expert. Therefore, it is unsurprisingly that translation highlights the preparation of background information and requires the translator to be familiar with the relevant contents before she sets out to work. And in this case, they are seed-related knowledge. The following are the resources that the translator used.
(1) Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae: http://www.cn-flora.ac.cn:28080/plantonline /plantonlinesite/toScientificName
The translator made full use of the website and noted all the plants mentioned in the source text and read relative information in this website, including morphological characteristics, living environment, habitat, and others.
(2) Being: https://cn.bing.com/
Being was used to read parallel texts in English by entering the keywords and to check the correctness of translation against the pictures searched in the picture column.
2.2 While-Translation
2.2.1 Vocabulary
In vocabulary translation, functional equivalence is reflected in the flexibility and appropriateness of the word choosing.
First, flexibility of the word choosing. Since words are the smallest yet most active language unit, sometimes, the translator needs to be flexible towards the translation of words. Take “极限(limit, extreme)” as an example, in “可以想象出种子飞行的一种极限(we can tell the farthest that seeds can reach)”, it is translated as “the fastest”, but in “只有天空才是极限(Sky is the only forbidden place)”, it is translated as “the only forbidden place.”
Second, appropriateness of the word choosing. Bringing the scientific or literary nature of the words into full play is a question for the translator to tackle. Two steps to solve this problem: First, define the nature of the word—Is it scientific or literary? Second, make a “quality control” of the word’s nature, that is, being careful that the words with scientific nature not only being scientific and clear enough but also free of the overusing of technical jargon, and that the words with literary nature being expressive yet not being euphuistic. It could be easily solved by using pragmatic markers or even language intuition, but judging which word equates the source text most is the real difficulty lies in vocabulary translation. Therefore, the use of dictionaries is mentioned hereof, which helps the translator avoid polysemy ambiguation and select the closest equivalent. And the following is an example of using dictionary to select the fit translation.
Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework .................................... 11
3.1 Introduction to Functional Equivalence .......................... 11
3.2 Application of Functional Equivalence................................ 12
Chapter 4 Case Study ........................................ 15
4.1 Lexical Equivalence .............................. 15
4.1.1 Equivalence of Scientific Nature ................................ 15
4.1.2 Equivalence of Literary Nature .................................. 16
Chapter 5 Conclusion .................................. 29
5.1 Limitations and Solutions ............................... 29
5.2 Gains and Reflections ................................. 30
Chapter 4 Case Study
4.1 Lexical Equivalence
To achieve functional equivalence at the lexical level, it is first categorized according to its scientific or literary nature. Word is the basic component of language, and it is indispensable to analyze both form and meaning. The so-called scientific or literary nature is judged by the function and effect that the words want to achieve. The following pages give the details of how the translator equates the words.
4.1.1 Equivalence of Scientific Nature
By analyzing words, the translator can select the most appropriate ones to achieve harmony and unity with the sentences. The equivalence in scientific nature is important, and if the scientific nature of words is not equated, it may cause the following problems: unclear or unprofessional as shown in Case 1, repetition or redundancy as shown in Case 2, inappropriate register markers, wrong or ambiguous meaning, and so forth.
Case 1
Source Text: 这种远行得益于种子上附着的毛茸茸的．．．．冠毛，飞行时其周围会形成特殊空气涡流，这些冠毛可以精确调整，以稳定涡流，延缓下降，保持飞行高度。 （P. 027 ）
Target Text: Why? The seeds get velutinous pappi attached to themselves, which can form special air eddies around during the flight. These pappi can be adjusted accurately to stabilize the eddy current, hence delaying the descent and maintaining a flying height.
Analysis: This is a typical case of achieving scientific equivalence at the lexical level. Without context, any word that refers to “茸毛的” is acceptable, but to be more accurate, it should be “velutinous” –“covered with a fine and dense silky pubescence”, which is used to describe hairs on the surface of a seed. With the existence of a fixed reference in English, even its synonyms will be less appropriate and look less professional.
Chapter 5 Conclusion
5.1 Limitations and Solutions
Needless to say, there is a long way to go before a greenhorn becomes a dab hand, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in both translation and paper writing. Due to the limitation of the translator's knowledge, this report has an incline to be subjective. Due to the limitation of the length of the report, this report has an incline to be unsystematic. For example, “4.2 Functional Equivalence at Syntactic Level” alone could get a whole report itself with clearer divisions and elaborate analysis, and as one section, there is a forced reduction in contents, and to tell the truth, it is not even a successful abridger. And space permitting, “4.2 Functional Equivalence at Syntactic Level” can be divided into 4.2.1 “Difficult Points” such as “sentence structure”, “logic”, “grammar” and so on, and 4.2.2 “Solutions” such as “reorganization”, “negation” and others, and each with more detailed analysis. But with both limited space and a general theme of “functional equivalence”, these could be too detailed.
Those problems can be solved through input study of relative material and better organization of report. For example, in this translation, to compensate for the lack of botany knowledge, the translator selected professional materials and parallel texts in advance and read through the source text to get an overall view of the book and an understanding of the style. To settle the popping problems that one may never expect, the translator kept studying and dealt with them one by one. To ensure a higher quality, when the translation was finished, the translation was read repeatedly along with the source text to scrutinize the doubtful points, collate the details, and ensure that no errors or omissions existed in the translation. Done with the translation, it should be careful thought out the focus of the paper to arrange the paper’s layout.
reference(omitted)