The beauty of dying stars: A corpus-based translation of popular science articles on supernovae

The field of translation is tied to the development of our civilization as it had a tremendous impact on the development of national languages and on the dissemination of culture. Specifically, scientific translation played a crucial role in the circulation of science and it facilitated the great advancement of our time. This dissertation aims to propose the translation of a selection of popular science articles that discuss the specialised topic of supernovae, namely celestial objects studied within the field of Astronomy. The translation process was conducted with a corpus-based approach which, since its dawns within the field of translation studies, has proved to be an extremely useful resource. Corpus-driven studies enable linguists and translators to process a large amount of data, leaving behind the time-consuming methods of the past. For this dissertation, the corpus creation process involved the collection of popular science articles in English and Italian in order to create two corpora: one comparable corpus for analysis and one DYI corpus for the translation process. Finally, the thesis aims to deliver target texts that follow the norms of popular science discourse, that is the employment of strategies and techniques that can simplify highly technical information and, consequently, make them accessible to a large number of lay readers.