A Study On E-C Translation Of Linguistic Terminology From The Perspective Of Hermeneutics

There have been arguments about whether linguistics is a science, especially when it was just coming into being. But now the arguments die away and linguistics has firmly established its place as a major branch of humanities and social sciences as well. The development of modern linguistics in China is closely connected with linguistic terminology and its translation. With the increasing number of linguistic terminology, there is excessive limitation and even confusion in much of the terminology translation currently used. Based on the features of linguistic terminology and bottlenecks of its translation, it serves to illustrate two important points. The first is that linguistic terminology translation plays a fundamental role in helping us describe more complex definitions and phenomena in a certain branch of linguistics. And the second is that any terminology translation of any linguistic definitions and phenomena must be maximally explicit, and to be explicit. Therefore, it is necessary for us to address the Chinese translations of wide-used linguistic terms and put forward a feasible approach to linguistic terminology translation.Hermeneutics is a kind of philosophy of understanding and interpretation. It has a long history of several thousand years, which appeared as early as in ancient Greek. Hermeneutics has undergone several stages, methodological hermeneutics first represented by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Martin Heidegger brought about ontological hermeneutics, and Hans-George Gadamer brought western modern philosophical hermeneutics into existence. But the key development of the hermeneutics of translation goes to George Steiner’s influential After Babel:Aspects of Language and Translation, which is the first systematical study on hermeneutics and translation."Steiner’s book remains an important contribution to hermeneutics and the theory of the language of translation"(Munday,2001:167).With the development of Hermeneutics, it determines its close relation with translation. Hermeneutics provides a profound inspiration for scholars to rethink translation problems of linguistic terminology.After a brief trip round the previous studies on linguistic terminology and its translation and a thoroughly dip into the hermeneutics, theoretical application will be used in linguistic terminology translation. As the discussion above, hermeneutics plays an important role in the proper description of the limitations of linguistic terminology translation, one such description is that the bottlenecks of its translation is inevitable. Before the discussion go any further, it is useful to clarify the evidence for inevitability, beside hermeneutics’application, complicated language entity and word formation in English-Chinese comparative studies can be proved to explain the limitations of linguistic terminology translation is inevitable.The author generalizes the description above somewhat and treats the limitations as an inevitable phenomenon in terminology translation, and then a systematical statement can be achieved to express linguistic terminology translation by describing the theoretical and practical evidence. It is argued that there are vast arrays of facts which lend strong practical support to the statement that the confusion of linguistic terminology translation is inevitable when it occurs in different linguistic branches. Furthermore, a feasible approach will be discussed that the corresponding translations should be unified when this term only occurs in the same linguistic branch.More precisely, as a primary consideration, any linguistic terminology translation should be analyzed in the same linguistic branch. And accordingly, beside the properties of terminology and principles of terminology translation, viz. accuracy, monosemy, systematization, linguistically correct conciseness, motivation, stability, and productivity, three feasible suggestions on linguistic terminology translation will be proposed.This thesis aims at the limitations of linguistic terminology translation, discusses inevitability of those problems based on hermeneutics’application and provides a feasible approach to linguistic terminology translation. It concludes that it is of great importance and necessity to standardize linguistic terminology translation, but there is still a long way to go.