EST Discourse And Translation

At the early stage of the study of EST, people mainly focus on superficial language phenomena such as word formation, grammatical structure, tense, voice, etc. It is only a kind of static analysis of register, which does not get to the core of language communication. Correspondingly, traditional translation theories of EST only pay attention to the translation of words and sentences and concentrate on the three aspects of vocabulary, grammar and professional knowledge. These theories certainly have their own values; however, since the object of translation is usually a discourse which is an organic entity, they are prone to one-sidedness and rigidness of translation. The advent of discourse analysis (text linguistics) offers a new way to study EST. This paper tries to use the functional rhetoric theory to discuss discourse analysis of EST, and on the basis of this discussion, it further explores the application of the results of the study to discourse translation of EST.The whole paper can be divided into four parts:Chapter 1 explains the necessity of discourse analysis of EST and reveals the advantages of EST translation in the dimension of discourse.Chapter 2 first introduces various definitions of discourse and states the relationship between discourse and rhetoric to illustrate the feasibility of studying discourse from the angle of rhetoric. Then in accordance with the features of EST, the paper offers an analysis model and makes a study of EST discourse in detail from four aspects: topic, rhetoric function, rhetoric technique and cohesive device. This study provides guidance for next chapter in theory and method.Chapter 3 is about the application of the fruits of discourse analysispresented in the preceding chapter. This chapter first discusses theIIsignificance of the method of discourse analysis in the stage of comprehension and expression. It suggests that to grasp three key points, i.e., topic, rhetoric technique and rhetoric function, will contribute to a good translation of EST discourse. Then, it carries out the application of discourse analysis in the checking and development of EST translation. The two aspects are illustrated through examples.The last part makes a summary for the whole paper. It emphasizes the author's point of view and points out that discourse analysis is beneficial not only to discourse translation itself but also to the development of teaching practice.The author believes it is a new channel to discuss discourse analysis and discourse translation from the angle of functional rhetoric. This paper is just a try that has yet to be proved by practice. Owing to the limitation of ability, there must be some improprieties in this paper, which need the readers' valuable comments. Anyway, the author cordially hopes that this paper can improve the understanding of the nature of EST and attract attention to the discourse translation of EST.