| The concept of "science" has already been used since 7th B.C. As an ancient civilized country. Greece was proud of its most sophisticated science at that time. Greek thus became the universal scientific language in Europe. During 7th B.C and 5th B.C, Latin acquired its own place and gradually took the place of Greek with Mediterranean countries emerged and it was used until 17th century. Those who engaged in scientific researches were trained to use Latin because scientific works must be written or translated into Latin. Not until 18th and 19th century did Germany chemistry and other scientific research develop so fast that German language was used in science instead of Latin. While in the early 20th century, English was designated as scientific language as science and technology made huge progress in English speaking countries like UK and USA. Statistics show that 2/3 of scientific papers in the world are written or published in English. So "English translation" becomes my major concern in scientific translation.It is the fact that Bilingual dictionaries in the true sense didn't appear until the time between 14th and 15th century. The appearance can be contributed to the development of European social culture, promotion of printing techniques, increasing need of communication among people of different accents and languages and gradual formation of individual national languages. In this special period of time, "word list" was evolved into bilingual dictionary both in name and in fact.In modern society, economic, cultural and scientific and technological communication among different countries has been developing rapidly and the amount of human knowledge has been accumulating explosively. To satisfy people's need to knowledge, dictionaries have played a more and more important role in the publications. It is so in many countries, France is a good example in case, the percentage of dictionaries has climbed from 15% to 23% in the publications in the last years of the 20th century. The most recent study about bilingual science dictionary is conducted by a few scholars in China. They put it into the whole framework of lexicography. Bilingual science dictionary contains two aspects:collection and translation of entry words and compilation project. The former is advanced by the study of its macro-structure and micro-structure and its distinctive features, while the study of compilation project is still neglected. Lexicographical compilation is a complicated and systematic project which involves compilers, dictionary users and publishing houses and institutions. Of course, a large amount of manpower, material resource and time should be invested in the project. Therefore it is necessary to put forward a sound theory to guide the practice.Since the compilation of dictionary is an organized and collective activity, the extemporaneous compilation of dictionary by a few people can only become a complementary part in the main stream market. The dictionary will never have a share in the market if its theme is not appropriate. So the main stream dictionaries in the future are destined to be those compiled and organized by academic institutions and published by professional publishing houses. It requires dictionary publishing houses and institutions enact a mid and long term development project. |
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