The Presentation Of "Elegance" In Technical English Translation

This thesis aims to analyze the translation of science and technology from the perspective of translation aesthetics. While presenting the beauties in technical translation, the paper further makes a tentative study on"elegance"principle in technical translation.Translation standard is a basic issue in translation, as well as a core issue in translation theories. In 1898, famous translator Yan Fu proposed three-character principles—"faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance", which play important roles in Chinese translation history. Technical English is a special style widely used in technical fields, which is usually objective narration, and to elucidate reasons, discussed questions or processes of narration, deduction and conclusion. The property of these contents decides the plain, concise and accurate characteristics of its language. Therefore, some people believe that"definitude, smoothness and concision"should be taken as standards of technical translation, and"accuracy, clarity and understandability"are the basic standards of technical translation."Definitude"and"accuracy"are corresponding to"faithfulness"principle of Yan Fu, referring to accurately expressing real meaning of the original text; while,"smoothness","clarity"and"understandability"accord with"expressiveness"principle, requiring that the translation should be fluent, concise and easy to understand. However,"elegance"has not been proposed as standards of technical translation till now, accurately speaking,"elegance"is not definitely proposed or emphasized as standards of technical translation. Then, whether"elegance"should be taken into consideration in technical translation?Translation for science and technology has certain creativity and scientific nature, although it is a science without independency. Successful technical translation is an artistic work transforming between two different languages, is an art expressed by language, and is scientific re-creation, which inevitably involves with beauty and aesthetic issues. Famous scholar Guo Moruo once said:"if the translation work is technical literature, it will be better if achieving the standards of'faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance'."The thesis confirms the importance and necessity of"elegance"in technical translation through qualitative analysis, and definitely proposes"elegance"as standards of technical translation.By exploring aesthetic information on lexical level, syntactic level and rhetoric level of technical translation, the thesis presents readers with unique beauties in technical translation, and further puts forward three strategies for elegant technical translation. The thesis combines technical translation with translation aesthetics, providing translation aesthetics with new study perspective and content. The author expects that the study of this thesis can provide richer and more effective theoretical guidance to technical translation, thereby improving the quality of technical translation.