Translating Science Journalism

Translating Science Journalism makes a contribution to the field of popular science, from a linguistic and translational perspective. It is rooted in Translation Studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics, with some insights from journalism, media studies and science communication studies. Even though it is widely acknowledged that popular science encompasses a wide range of discourses, the focus of this book is mainly on the journalistic practice it exemplifies. Specific focus is on the feature article in different written media – such as consumer magazines and specialized science magazines – when it undertakes a process of interlingual translation: what is the extent of the translator’s/editor’s intervention? In order to investigate how reality is represented in texts, how interpersonal relationships between the interactants of the communicative event are constructed, how the textual resources of lexicogrammar are used to create a cohesive and coherent text, and how these different meanings are rendered in target texts, the book proposes the analytical method of register theory (Halliday 1994), combined with that of Appraisal theory (Martin & White 2005). With the aim to illustrate these analytical models at work, a selection of pilot studies, focusing on the English-Italian language pair, is presented, dealing with different fields, subject fields and sub-domains, i.e. Natural sciences, Engineering and Technology, Medical and Health Sciences, and, more specifically, physical sciences (particle physics), evolutionary biology (biological sciences), electronic engineering and health sciences (infectious diseases).