A Report On Translation Of Mechanical Engineering Research Articles: From The Perspective Of Ideational Metaphor

The translation of academic discourse plays an important role in the development of science and technology. It is one of important factors to promote international academic exchange and scientific and technological progress. As academic discourse of science and technology involves a wide range of subjects, the translation of mechanical engineering research articles from the perspective of ideational metaphor is studied mainly in the report. Ideational metaphor is realized through transferences from congruent form to metaphorical form. The analysis of the text feature of mechanical engineering research articles is made. The approaches to achieve ideational metaphor from congruent form to metaphorical form through rank shift, transferences at the levels of process, functional element and lexical grammar is studied with examples. Finally, the relevant translation methods are summarized to provide advice for most translators engaged in translating mechanical engineering research articles. These can make the expression objective, formal and concise.Grammatical metaphor theory, text type theory and skopos theory are applied into the translation of mechanical engineering research articles both in Chinese and English. The total number of source texts is more than 18,000 words including two Chinese mechanical engineering research articles selected from MACHINE TOOL & HYDRAULICS and JOURNAL OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, and two English mechanical engineering research articles from Springer and At 8th International Conference on Digital Enterprise Technology- DET 2014.Through the study, summaries are shown as follows: first, both in Chinese and English mechanical engineering research articles, personal pronoun is the subject in congruent form, but “entity” is the subject in metaphorical form. As research articles highlight objective facts not actors, metaphorical form are helpful to realize this goal.Second, in English mechanical engineering research articles, the application of metaphorical form makes the expression more objective, formal and concise. Third, the subject always starts with verbs by omitting the subject in congruent form andmetaphorical form in Chinese research articles.Finally, some translation methods are provided as follows: translators should understand the content of source text, then translate it into congruent form and encode it as metaphorical form through rank shift and transferences at the levels of among process,functional element and lexical grammar in the process of translation from Chinese to English. During the translation from English to Chinese, translators should unpack the long sentence and analyze relations among nominal group, adjective group, prepositional group, etc. then translate source text into Chinese in congruent form and transfer the congruent form into metaphorical form. Besides, another two translation methods are introduced. As nominal structure is often seen in English but verb phrase in Chinese, the method of conversion of word class is used in the translation both in C-E and E-C. Some meaningless general vocabularies often appear in Chinese so general vocabulary translation is used in the translation from E-C.