Techniques Of EST Translation

The question whether translation should be source-text oriented or target-text oriented has been discussed by many translation theorists. The traditional translation standard has been based on the assumption that the original text should be the criterion for the assessment of the quality of the translation. This paper emphasizes the concept that "translation should be a rewriting of the original" The rewriting requires creative translation based on the recognition of the linguistic universals and peculiarities between English and Chinese. That is to say, translation should be treated as a creative activity and should not be rigidly constrained to the source language expressions and structures. In EST translation, the translator should penetrate the surface structure of English text to find out the hidden deep structure and express the deep structure in a surface structure that conforms to the Chinese habit and logic. But language is the dress of thought. To find out the linguistic universals and peculiarities, we must first analyze the logic of thinking in English and Chinese. For EST translation practice, this paper proposes a method: analysis of the logic of thinking + grammatical analysis. Grammatical analysis is only used as a supplementary means in sentence translation. - Analysis of the logic of thinking is used to find out the similarities and differences between English and Chinese and to find out the author's clue of thinking to help the translation. For this purpose, a comparison between English and Chinese is made before the presentation of translation techniques. The paper begins with an introduction to this method, followed by a presentation of the theoretical background. Then techniques of EST English-Chinese translation are illustrated in detail. A brief discussion of the Chinese-English translation is also included. Finally, the paper concludes that a good EST translator must have a sound knowledge of both English and Chinese language and a familiarity with the relevant scientific fields and the technical terms.