Context In EST Translation

EST (English for Science and Technology) is a specific style of English widely used in scientific and technical fields. Science and technology have drawn much attention of the whole country since the late 1970's, when China started its reform and opening-up. EST plays a significant role in the course of learning new science and advanced technology from other countries, and of introducing the situation in China to the outside world as well. To date, however, there are still many problems in EST translation. For instance, some translations are hard to understand or ambiguous, and mistakes in target text are common. The study on EST translation mainly concentrates on concrete methods, including translation of terminology, sentences and so on while little attention has been paid to in-depth research.Context plays a significant role in EST translation. To date, however, little attention has been paid to this aspect. This thesis tries to study EST translation from the perspective of context. For the convenience of study, the constituents included in context should be classified. Scholars from home and abroad have classified context in various ways. Based on some of these classifications, the author summarizes a classification that is in particular suitable for EST translation. Context is divided into linguistic context and non-linguistic context. Linguistic context consists of lexical context, grammatical context and textual context; non-linguistic context includes background context, general context and professional context. The objective of this thesis is to study the influence of all these factors of context on EST translation. For the lack of space, and also because the author's experiences of EST translation are mainly confined to translation from English to Chinese, this thesis will focus on EST translation from English to Chinese.The study of EST translation in this thesis is conducted at three levels — word, sentence and text:...