Approaches To The Translation Of English For Science And Technology By Skopos Theory

Against the background of "knowledge explosion" and "information explosion" prevailing in the world today, whether a country can acquire valuable knowledge and the latest information would doubtlessly matter greatly to its advance of science and technology and its development of economy as well. Under such a context, communication in science and technology among the different countries is of great necessity and significance. Translation of technical writings as a medium thus plays an important role in disseminating technical information internationally.In order to better serve the need of translation, there must be appropriate theories to direct the translation action. The thesis, taking a descriptive way from the macro-level study to the micro-level study, presents the application of skopos theory in translation of English for Science and Technology (EST) through integrating the macro-level translation skopos and text function with the micro-level syntactic structures and lexical expressions.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter one discusses the concept of EST, illustrates the main distinction between technical writing and writing of other styles in its vocabulary and grammar. With an aim to inform the readers of a certain scientific and technological result or an objective phenomenon, EST is concise, accurate and logical with a lot of abbreviations and derivatives, non-finite verbs, and long sentences in it.Chapter two gives a brief introduction to the principal concepts and rules of skopos theory. The translator makes certain of translation purpose, and decides the general translation strategies and methods according the translation brief. In the following translation process, skopos rule plays a decisive part, while the coherence rule and fidelity rule are subordinate to the skopos rule. From the three rules comes the standard of translation of skopos theory, i.e. the target text should be adequate, but may not be equivalent to source text. At last, the chapter introduces loyalty rule, and discusses the significance of the rule of function plus loyalty.Chapter three analyzes the text type technical writings belong to in accordance with Reiss's text typology, which classifies texts into informative texts, expressive texts and operative texts according to the different contents, forms and effects. Technical texts are informative ones with a core function to convey information to the reader.Chapter four applies the skopos theory to EST translation from such aspects as rhetoric at lexical, syntactic and paragraph level, logic at understanding and expressing stage, and elliptical patterns with the possible translation strategies.At last, the thesis comes to its conclusion, emphasizing the importance of applying skopos theory to EST translation again, but it also points out that skopos theory needs to be improved and developed through practice.