Discursive strategies implemented in the American scientific discourse popularization text and its translations into French and Polish: a contrastive study

Abstract

Multimodal diffusion of scientific knowledge (blogs, web pages, social networks, television programs) has become a dominant means for the dissemination of research results to the general public. As such, it forms a constitutive act in scientific knowledge popularization. We assume that this act needs to be analyzed by considering the discourse as a process of negotiation between text-producer and reader. The author’s ideas about the reader’s level of knowledge predetermines the way s/he organizes the information content and makes lexical and syntactic choices to ease access to the message and facilitate its understanding. This article aims to demonstrate some of the linguistic and discursive strategies (1) used by the American authors of popular science texts and (2) adapted by the translators into French and Polish of these texts in order to make the scientific discourse more readable and understandable, to highlight the communicative proximity with the reader, and to focus her or his attention on relevant information.