A Corpus-Based Study On Armament Terms Translation

Armaments terms, as a part of military English, fall in the domain of English for science and technology. The academic value of armaments nomenclature and translation has attracted much attention in linguistics and military fields. Contrary to the prosperous and productive research conducted in American armaments nomenclature and other military English fields, the researches on armaments terms translation are still far from specialization and completion. Most of the researches are conducted separately instead of combining the nomenclature rules and translation strategies. In this thesis, the author will conduct a study joining the armaments nomenclature and their translation.With the introduction and growth of corpus linguistics, many language researchers have been trying to apply parallel corpus to the study of translation, and it has been testified to be effective. Corpus is made up of real texts, and it enjoys the advantages of great capacity and fast search function. Therefore, corpus, especially parallel corpus, has been largely applied to linguistics and translation studies.However, there is not yet any corpus-based study on the translation of armaments terms. With the aid of a small-sized self-built parallel corpus, the author of this thesis carries out a research on the armaments terms nomenclature and their translation. The aim of this thesis is to study armaments designating principles both at home and abroad, and link them with the translation principles, and make a comparison of the different translated versions of the same armaments, in order to find out the translation tendency of armaments terms. The significant findings of the research are as follows:(1) When the terms of Chinese armaments are translated into English, the ones with NATO code names are mostly translated based on functional equivalence theory; the ones without NATO code names are also mostly translated in accordance with functional equivalence theory. (2) When the terms of American and EU countries'armaments are translated into Chinese, the ones named after well-known people and places are translated based on foreignizing theory and they normally have only one original name and one Chinese name; 12.5% of the ones with more than one original names are translated based on the functional equivalence theory, and 37.5% of the armaments with more than one original names are translated with functionalist approach in German language countries.