A Translation Study of Scientific Text from the Perspective of Relevance Theory: A Case Study of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Abstract

Over the centuries, with the development of economy, the excessive interference of human activities on the natural environment has caused profound changes in the earth's ecosystem. Under a White Sky: the Nature of the Future by American environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert is based on the relationship between man and nature, focusing on climate change. This article is based on the first part of chapter 1 of this book which describes the author's field investigation of river pollution in the United States, carp invasion of hydrological system and control measures. The paper hopes that more readers will recognize the destruction that human activities have caused to the Earth's ecosystem, and awaken more people's awareness of respecting nature and protecting ecology. Under the guidance of relevance translation theory, the author takes the optimal relevance principle as the translation criterion. Based on the cognitive context of the target audience, the translator adopts some translation skills including adding comments, meaning extension, part of speech conversion, division and combination, and word order adjustment, which will make the translation readable and in line with the Chinese language norms and expression habits.