A Case Study On The Application Of Modal Logic And Binary Relation In The Translation Of Ecological Guidelines

The stylistic attribution of technology translation, features for its strict reasoning, accuracy and objectiveness, indicates an equivalent logic entailment in translations. The source language text of this project, Guidelines for Ecological Impact Assessment in the United Kingdom, which covers a wide range of disciplines, for example animals and plants, climate, water conservation, transport and legal requirements, is in itself both of technology and law stylistics, and abounds in prescriptive and scientific languages and certain characteristics of law English. During the project, challenges arising from the project, apart from an unfamiliarity of terms, mainly come from the difficulties in understanding the logical structure. Failure of rightly interpreting the logical structure of the source language will inevitably be reflected in an unqualified translation. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct logical analysis during both the comprehension of source language and the expression in target language.Logic and strict reasoning are not uncommon in the text of this project. The text itself could be able to provide a small corpus for logical analysis. For this reason, modal logic and binary relation were introduced into the Chinese translation of the Guideline to analyze the text from the perspectives of modal logic and binary relation and attempts were made to further study the application of modal logic and binary relation in the translation of ecological guidelines. Modal logic mainly contains necessity proposition, possibility proposition, imperative proposition, prohibition proposition and allowance proposition. Binary relation mainly contains reflexivity, symmetry, asymmetry and transitivity. Both modal logic and binary relation are proved to be useful in comprehension, translation and revision in this project.