Technical Translation From The Perspective Of English-Chinese Structural Contrast

With the development of modern science and technology and the increase of international technical communication, technical translation is playing a more and more important role in the introduction of new technology.A good translation of technical texts should not only cover the information of the original as much as possible, but also express the information as appropriately and idiomatically as possible in target language. However, there are a large number of illogically wrong sentences and unidiomatic expressions in technical texts, which greatly influences the correct transferring of the original meaning.The author of this thesis intends to probe into technical translation from the perspective of English-Chinese structural contrast.This thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter points out the major problems in technical translation, and then proposes exploring technical translation from the perspective of English-Chinese structural contrast.The second chapter gives a general review of technical translation studies in China. On the basis of discussing standards for technical translation, this chapter states the necessity to further study the methods of technical translation so as to achieve the standards as closely as possible.The third chapter is the theoretical foundation of the thesis. Based on the study of deep structure and surface structure in TG Grammar, and inspired by some tentative experiment, the author suggests applying deep structure and surface structure to the structural analysis in technical translation on the basis of contrastive study of English and Chinese structures. The fourth chapter makes a detail analysis of the structures of English and Chinese at lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level. This chapter provides the translator with different syntactic features of English and Chinese for correctly obtaining and expressing the meaning of the original text.The fifth chapter is the core of this thesis. It illustrates in detail how to do technical translation from the perspective of English-Chinese structural contrast. Many translation techniques have been elaborated with examples. In this chapter, examples are mainly analyzed in the following steps: to read through the surface structure to the deep structure of the sentences in source text, based on the structural analysis of source language; to transfer the meaning from the deep structure of the sentences in source text to the deep structure of the sentences in target language; and to reconstruct the sentences in target language from deep structure to certain surface structure, based on the structural analysis of target language.Through the study of the thesis, it is found that it is a good way to do technical translation from the perspective of English-Chinese structural contrast. The contrastive analysis of English and Chinese structures can help the translator overcome the difficulties caused by the structural differences, and then help him read through the surface structure to the deep structure so as to obtain the correct meaning of the original. The contrastive analysis can also help the translator reduce the effects of the original structures, and help him transform the deep structures to surface structure in target language. In addition, it can help the translator reduce the monotony of sentence patterns in technical translation by guiding him to transform a deep structure into several well-formed surface structures.