Investigating Translation Strategies And Units In The Geological Translation Process:a Think-aloud Protocol Study

Traditional translation studies usually attach more importance to the product study other than the process study. However, it is believed that without process-oriented study, translation studies could not stand itself as a separated discipline. With the development of cognitive science and psychology, thinking aloud protocols (TAPs) has been used to describe and explain mental activities of translators and has thus promoted the empirical study of translation process.This study tends to describe the use of translation strategies and units employed by the translators during their translation practice. The thesis used TAPs method to collect data from earth science students in China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) through their verbal translation process while conducting two geological texts from and into English. While the data collected sorted from only data of5senior geological students from EPP (English for professional Purpose) satisfied the analysis requirements. Still, the TAPs data were then coded in two coding systems, namely, the Translational Strategies Coding System (Lorscher,1996) and Translational Units Coding System (Gerloff,1987). The coded TAPs were then analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, with focus on elements and patterns of translation strategies and translation units the subjects worked with in the process of translating, and also the similarities and differences in the two directions of translation.Findings of this research are mainly summarized into two aspects:use of translation strategies and units. In the first place, it identifies the basic and expanded patterns of translation strategies the subjects use and the principles they follow in employing these strategies. The study also finds out the features of use of translation units the subjects worked with. Word, Phrase, Clause, and Sentence are more commonly used as the translation units. And we can see that Clause (31%in E-C and40%in C-E) is the most frequently adopted unit of translation both in E-C and C-E for the subjects. The study also finds out that both in E-C and C-E translation, the most frequently used potential translation strategy is MSL, from which, a conclusion can be made that the subjects in this study are inclined to repeat the source text to understand the texts in the translation process. The result verifies that any translation begins from understanding, which is the basic and first step of translation.In C-E translation, the subjects have preferences for use of clause or sentence level as unit, however, when the subjects translate from English, it is obvious that they are inclined to take smaller units like clause or word level. In addition, the thesis demonstrates that TAPs plays a significant role in exploring the nature of geological translation process and improving translation teaching methodology.