A Corpus-driven Study On Translation Explicitation In The Abstracts Of Agricultural Science And Technology English Literature

With the frequent exchanges of advanced agricultural science and technology at home and abroad, English for Agriculture is becoming a significant branch of English for Science and Technology. As a vast agricultural country, China has witnessed a great boost in the market of agriculture techniques Chinese-English translation resent years. There is growing demands in professions and standardization of translation quality. A good many problems need urgent settlement in the C-E translation and E-C translation. Good translation of abstracts is very helpful in promoting research results to enter international scientific forum. In the past15years, corpus used in translation and scholars also discussed a lot of theoretical and empirical, which make this research approaches gradually developed into a new research paradigm.The recent study conducts an investigation on the explicitation in agricultural techniques English though corpus quantitative research approaches in the hope of gaining some insights on agriculture technique English. As a result, it finds that there is a clear explicitation phenomenon in both conjunction and pronoun translation, but there are still insufficient. So we should decide how to use explicitation technique in translating certain conjunctions and pronouns so as to make our translation more appropriate and expressive. Based on a small self-built English and Chinese parallel corpus which includes40Chinese abstracts and their translations of agriculture science and technology English literature, the explicitation features in the Chinese-English scientific articles were studied by using the corpus empirical method. Also, the author explores the conjunction to verify the assumption that the explicitation feature also exists in scientific articles thus offering new methods and new ideas for translation studies. Furthermore, based on the theoretical backgrounds of translation explicitation, this study compares40pieces of English abstracts with40pieces of English versions of Chinese abstracts and the results have helped to reveal universal explicitation and non-universal explicitation. The comparison indicates that explicitation is obvious in English translation of abstract, especially manifesting in directives, connectives and first-person pronouns. The results of comparison compensate the explicitation hypothesis of Blum-Kulka, and put content explicitation and lexical densities into the studies of translation explicitation. Further analysis reveals that the explicitation in abstract translation involves both translation-inherent explicitation and extra explicitation for the pragmatic purposes. Thus, it provides evidence for stratifying studies of translation explicitation.The thesis is divided into five chapters. They are sequentially the introduction, the literature review, the theoretical framework for the study, the analysis of comparison on Chinese abstracts and their English versions; also compare English abstracts with English versions of Chinese abstracts, and the conclusion. The research methods are the combination of qualitative method and quantitative method, and case study. This study wishes to inspire the application of explicitation in Chinese and English versions practice of agricultural science and technology texts in a way that could be better understood by readers of target language.