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Formal Shifts Of Nominalization In English-Chinese Technical Translation

Posted on:2009-05-20Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L L BiFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360245486527Subject:English Language and Literature
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Along with the rapid progress made in science and technology all around the world, technical texts are becoming more widely used among people in various fields and from different nations. Since China has been involved in globalization, English-Chinese technical translation has become a topic of much concern and importance in modern language study as well as in the operation of translation practice. As this is concerned, researches on English-Chinese technical translation have been playing a significant role in China's introducing advanced science and technology from other countries as well as in achieving better exchange with each other in relevant domain.As to technical text, it is held that it covers many kinds of specialized texts in science and technology, and in other disciplines as well, such as economics and medicine. As one of the distinguished features of technical texts, nominalization contributes to the requirements of technical writing including brevity, objectivity and formality. But the nominalized part in English can hardly be adopted by Chinese without any transposition, since English is a more inflecting language characterized by its preponderance of nouns over verbs, while Chinese is more isolating. Hence, if a reader in Chinese expects the most benefit from the piece of technical text that he is reading with the least cognitive effort, some particular rules are to be needed during translating in order to make it fit for the common use of the target language—Chinese.Peter Newmark, a famous linguistics and translation theorist, set a hierarchy for descriptive units, and holds that certain descriptive unit may shift from the SL (source language) to its TL (target language) either on the same rank or cross ranks, which makes the activity of translating virtually accessible in terms of the formal shifts translaiton. In accordance with the systemic differences between English and Chinese, and based on the rank shifts theory, comparative and analytic method is to be adopted in this qualitative research to design a model for shifts which can be used for the E-C translation of nominalization in technical texts; this paper also attempts to further the discussion on the available E-C translating of nominalization in technical texts and its related problems under the guidance of the principle of shifts model.The theory of formal shifts from Newmark is of much importance to the field of technical translation both theoretically and practically and this paper is actually a trial to investigate its utility in dealing with the transposition of nominalization in technical texts from English to Chinese. Although there are deficiencies, I hope that limited contributions can be made through this paper to improve translation in practice and its training, and to develop students" capacity of reading and publishing papers in international journals. And it is believed that fruitful results are expected to be soon achieved through further research and effort in this field.
Keywords/Search Tags:technical texts, nominalization, shifts, translation
PDF Full Text Request
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