A Study On The English Translation Of Ancient Chinese Agricultural Term

Agricultural term, as an essential part of the scientific and technical terminology, are loaded with abundant of scientific and technical information in the field of agriculture. Therefore, the researches and studies in the field of agricultural terms have attracted much attention from the agricultural technicians and the scholars. However, due to the development of the science and technology at home and abroad, the researches on the translation of the scientific and technical term mainly focus on the English-Chinese translation. The Chinese-English Translation of the scientific and technical term does not gain the corresponding attention from the academic and practical field. The Chinese-English translation of ancient Chinese agricultural terms in particular is still in the early stage of development.In this thesis, Tiangong Kaiwu is chosen as the source language text and the first complete English version of Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century by Ren Yidu and Sun Shouquan as the target language text. In this thesis, the author takes the translated terms of the cultivation and the processing of the grains as the research subject. Those terms are extracted from the chapters of The Grain and the Preparation of the Grains.The thesis has gained the following three major findings:Firstly, as for the characteristics of the Chinese terms in the original text, the most obvious one is conciseness. Most of the Chinese terms just consist of one single Chinese character. Besides conciseness, those terms contain much Chinese cultural loaded information and represent the special Chinese traditional objects relating to the grains’ cultivation and processing.Secondly, as for the translation methods, the mainly applied translation methods are liberal translation, literal translation, transliteration, literal and liberal translation and transliteration and liberal translation. The most frequently used method is liberal translation. Therefore, the first complete English version mainly adopts domestication. Foreignization is also employed to convey the Chinese traditional cultural information in the terms.Thirdly, as for the problems or the dissatisfactions in the process of the translation practice, there are mainly three which are presented in Chapter four. The first one is the inconsistency of the translated terms. The second is that some of the terms between the upper categories and the lower categories are not differentiated. The third one is the mistranslation of the terms.Based on the study of the translation of the agricultural terms in the first complete English version of Tiangong Kaiwu, this thesis aims to arouse more attention of the researchers and the scholars on ancient Chinese agricultural terms. Such a work will contribute to the broadness of the ancient Chinese science and technology in agriculture both at home and abroad.