The Translation Strategy Of Long And Complex Sentences In Medical Report

As an important branch of English for Science and Technology(EST) translation, medical translation has been playing an important role in the communication between Chinese and Western cultures. According to Peter Newmark’s translation theory, the original text belongs to informative text, which requires preciseness, fluency and formality. The characteristics of medical English text possesses many modifiers, determiners and adjuncts which will lengthen the sentence. Therefore, medical English translation has to combine literal translation with liberal translation and remain faithful and coherent based on its feature and the translation strategy.The translation material is A brief account of an Ophthalmic Hospital at Macao, during the years 1827 to 1832, inclusive. The other is Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton: first quarterly report, from the 4th of November 1835 to the 4th of February 1836. Medical terms that appears in long and complex sentences increases the difficulty of translation; the spelling of some ophthalmic terms have changed since then, so the translator has to find the correct spelling and usage of these terms nowadays. To tackle these problems, the author has to fully understand the articles as well as get familiar with ophthalmic terms.The first part is to introduce the characteristics of the medical translation and the original texts; the second part focuses on describing the process of translation. The third part is case analysis. The author focuses on analyzing the translation methods of medical terms and the translation of long and complex sentences by using methods like literal translation and division in translating long and complex sentences. Through this report, the author hopes to improve her translation skills, and learn more about medical text features and non-literary translation strategies.