Study On The Translation Process Of Drug Description

The process of translation has not received enough attention in translation studies. With the development of cognitive science and psychology, think-aloud (TA) has been used to describe and explain mental activities of translators and it has promoted the empirical study of translation process.In this research, the translation process was investigated with the technique of TA. Translation learners were recruited as the subjects and drug description was taken as the translation text. Translation units and strategies were observed both in E-C translation and C-E translation, and the similarities and differences in the two directions of translation were compared and contrasted. Think-aloud protocols were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively after data collecting, transcribing and coding, with the focus on the characteristics and main problems revealed in the translation process.The results of the study indicate that the unit of translation(UT) is a dynamic linguistic entity in the translation process. UT mainly lies at the level of words, phrases, clauses and sentences with words as the major UT the participants focused on. There were some differences in the subjective translation unit and the objective translation unit. More words were used as UT in Chinese-to-English translation than English-to-Chinese translation, which supports the claim that differences exist in two translation directions. The most commonly used strategy was text rereading. And the text data repeated most often was in the participants' second language. There were some correlations between the frequency of translation strategies and the quality of translated texts.Subjects have more expression problems when they translated from language 1 to language 2, while they have more comprehension problems when they translated from language 2 to language 1. These results reconfirmed the advantages and disadvantages of different translation directions. It is found that the most common issues the participants were aware of lay at the lexical level, and little attention was paid to the problems at the textual level.