Translating Long Sentences In Technical Texts

Science and technology change with each passing day and play an increasingly important role in the development of society. As a result, it is necessary to keep up with the lasted science and technology in other countries. During the global spreading and exchange of science and technology, translation plays an essential role. Excellent translated texts promote the development of science and technology. On the other hand, terrible translation could hinder its progress. However, differences in culture, ways of thinking, and language lead to many difficulties in understanding as well as translation. Technical texts are usually logically structured and brief in content. Therefore, how to translate technical texts into faithful and appropriate target texts seem to be very important.This thesis aims to study translation of long sentences in technical texts. The source text in this thesis is selected from an entry in Wikipedia, Space Race. The background of the text sets in the struggle for hegemony between America and the Soviet Union. It mainly introduces the development of space technology in the period of Cold War. The source text features frequent use of long sentences with complicated structures. When translating the source text into Chinese, translators should not only know language features of the source text, but also master the relation between sentences. At the same time, the translator also needs to rewrite the translation based on the features of target language, making it in line with the habits of the target language and faithful to the source language. From the perspective of Newmark’s communicative translation theory, the thesis mainly proposes three translation strategies, namely linear translation reverses translation and division as the basic strategies and also puts forward some suggestions for future studies.