English-Chinese Translation Report On Civil Engineering--Geotechnical Engineering

Civil Engineering, especially Geotechnical Engineering, is an important field of Science and Technology. In recent years, translation works of English textbook, academic materials, newspaper, magazines, contract and tenders of C ivil Engineering have grown in quantity. In spite of this, the translation of relevant materials is demanding and scarce, and deserves great attention and carefully profound analysis.The translation report is based on a project of C ivil Engineering and Geotechnical Engineering and the translation is completed by the author under the guidance of Nida's functional equivalence theory. The theory provides theoretical guidance from two aspects. O ne is to emphasize the important role of receptors in translation and thus to result natural and accurate translations for receptors. The other priority is given to flexibility in translation with regard to some necessary and rational adjustments, which is to say that translators have a freedom to adopt appropriate translation strategies to suit for the context.Then the author conducts a detailed analysis of the whole translation, based on case studies. The analysis covers three levels, respectively lexical, syntactic and textual level, presenting translation features, difficulties and strategies in the translation. At lexical level, typical Geotechnical Engineering works in English are characterized by abundant use of technical terms, and application of academic features such as nominalization, use of logical connectives, abbreviations and formulas. Accordingly, two strategies in translation are adopted to realize functional equivalence of the two languages. First strategy employed is conversion which achieves equivalence in translation by shifting word class of the source language. Second is diction, another important strategy where translators determine the most accurate expression according to the context of the source text. At syntactic level, there are many passive voice sentences, as well as long and difficult sentences in Geotechnical Engineering. For the translation of passive voice, three ways are employed, translating passive voice into passive voice, changing passive sentences into affirmative sentences and transferring the passive voice verb into non-passive voice expressions. With regard to long and difficult sentences, four strategies are put forward, linear translation, inversion translation, division and reconstruction. In cases where two languages' narrative levels are similar, linear translation is applied. Then the use of inversion translation, shift of word order, is another strategy which not only makes the sentences more compact, but also helps to achieve cohesion and coherence in expression. Last two strategies division and reconstruction are discussed together as useful strategies in breaking up the original sentence and reconstructing the separate parts. At textual level, cohesion and consistency of text need to be paid attention to. Cohesion concept requires anslators to choose proper translation based on the text to make the text coherent. In addition text is a meaningful consistent integrity, and therefore keeping consistency of translation in a text, especially the consistency of technical words' meaning and forms, is very essential.To sum up, this report elaborates the textual features of C ivil Engineering and Geotechnical Engineering and discusses effective translation strategies based on the theory of functional equivalence, which aims to make a little contribution to translation of the fields and provide some practical suggestions for translators devoted to these fields.