Discourse Analysis And Translation Of EST Instructions

Translation is a linguistic activity, it is also the operation which consists in transferring one language into another all the meaning elements of a text. At the early stage of the study of EST, people mainly focus on superficial language phenomena such as word formation, grammatical structure, tense and voice, etc. It is only a static description of register, which does not get the core of language communication. Correspondingly, traditional translation theories of EST only pay attention to words and sentences and concentrate on the three aspects of vocabulary, grammar and 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 analysis )offers a new way to study EST. This paper tries to use discourse linguistic theories to discuss discourse analysis and discourse translation of EST, and on the basis of this discussion, it further explores the application of the results of the study to discuss translation of EST. Since China has joined WTO, with the development of economic globalization, all trades and professions meet new opportunities and challenges. In order to better communicate with the developed countries, EST translation becomes more and more important. With the development of the society, in order to meet people's ever-increasing demands of their material and spiritual life, new products of new variety spring up daily along with numerous introductions for them. Introductions play a great role in popularizing the products and helping customers accept and use them. Introductions may be written in various languages, since English is the most widely used language, this thesis focuses on EST instructions as its object of study and analyze their stylistic features systematically.Trying to make the study exhaustive and specific, four native English instructions are collected through many channels. The author analyzes and translates these instructions as samples in Chapter Five by way of comparison and statistic analysis.Based on the reality, the author makes a tentative and more comprehensive study of EST articles, especially English instructions, from the perspective of discourse analysis. Discourse translation is a new translation method for translation practice, which advocates that the translators do translation operation on the basis of the whole text, its content includes the following three aspects: 1. translator's vision should be widened from the syntactic level to discourse level, which is the decision level of translation; 2. text type and communicative function are closely related with translation strategy and method:3, translation should take translation situation into account.The whole thesis can be divided into six parts:Chapter One explains the necessity of discourse analysis of EST and reveals the advantages of EST discourse translation in the dimension of discourse.Chapter Two reviews the recent studies of discourse linguistics and discourse translation achieved by different scholars abroad and at home.In Chapter Three the author focuses on her attention mainly on the analysis ofdiscourse features.Chapter Four. introduces the stylistic features of EST and English instructions.Then Chapter Five is about the application of the fruits of discourse analysis presented in the proceeding chapter, through the analysis of four samples of English instructions, the author illustrates her ideas mentioned above in the thesis.In the last part the author makes a summary for the whole paper. It emphasizes the author's point of view and points out that the 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. This paper is just a try that has yet to be proved by practice. Owing to the limitations of ability, there must be some improprieties in this paper, which needs the readers' valuable comments. Anyway, the author cordially hopes that the paper can prove the understanding of the nature of EST and attract attention to the discourse translation of EST. In a word, the writer's contribution is that she uses the discourse linguistics theory to make analysis of English instruction among EST article, thus this thesis can not only contribute to filling up the vacancy in EST discourse analysis, but can also provide guidance and referential materials for the understanding, translating and writing of EST instructions, which is rarely done abroad and at home.