I have been studied (sort of)!

I was fascinated to discover that my old book Armageddon Science has become the subject of a masters thesis. To be more precise, the experience of of translating two chapters of it into Chinese has been documented. All I know about the exercise is that it is the work of one M X Xi and was finished by May 2013. I haven't seen the actual thesis, but here is the abstract for your delectation:

This paper is a report based on the author’s experience of translating two chapters of Brian Clegg’s popular science book Armageddon Science, under the guidance of her supervisor. The report consists of six parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the task. The second part describes the translation process and translation requirements. Translation process generally includes three stages:preparation, translation and proofreading. And the translation requirements fall into two parts:format requirements and quality requirements. The third part focuses on the source text analysis, in which features of popular science are discussed and illustrated in details from three aspects, lexis, syntax and style. The fourth part is theoretical resources. A brief introduction is given to Nida’s theory of translation process, that is, analyzing, transferring, and restructuring. Then in the fifth part the focus is moved to the translation strategies under the guidance of Nida’s theory of translation process at the lexical, syntactic and textual levels:at the lexical level, the report discusses the translation of polysemy and cultural-loaded words; at the syntactic level, it talks about the translation strategies of passive voice, long and complex sentences, post-positioning of attributives and nominalization; at the textual level, it analyzes the logicality of the translation. In the last part the author summarizes the whole translation process and brings this report to an end.By describing the translation process and analyzing the source text, the author hopes that the report as well as the translation of Armageddon Science can give some enlightenment to those who translate such kind of texts.

So there you are. It's not everyone who gets Nida's theory applied to their work. If M X Xi ever sees this, please drop me an email at brian@brianclegg.net - I would love to hear a little more about why this book was chosen and how the experience went.

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