On The Qualities Of Chinese To English Translators Of Academic Papers

Nowadays,the academic communication and exchange among countries are becoming more and more frequent.As a consequence,a lot of academic papers and research reports have emerged.A large amount of researchers and scholars are trying to write their theses in English or seeking for help from translators to translate their papers into English in order to publish their research results on the international journals.However,because of the limitations of the English ability of the researchers and the academic knowledge of the translators,the output of high level thesis is not optimistic.A large number of scholars who have studied on the topic of C-E thesis translation in these twenty years mainly fixed their attention on linguistics and translation theories,while few of them studied the C-E thesis translation from the perspective of cultural differences.This paper aims to explore the problems and major differences translators may encounter in C-E thesis translation and propose solutions and suggestions towards the problems and differences from the perspective of "dual antithesis" and "continuous difference" by Nisbett R E.and Peng K P.in their book named The Geography of Thought:How Asians and Westerns Think Differently and Why.This research selects three Chinese scientific academic papers from the research fields of Medical Science,Computer Science and Environmental Science and their English versions which have been translated by one Chinese native speaker and an English speaker respectively as the corpus.Based on the translation versions of these three academic papers and the theoretical foundation of the research,this study proposes that the biggest challenge for English native C-E translators is to accurately understand the original text,while for Chinese C-E translators,the largest difficulty is to express the exact meaning of source language into target language.This research also finds out that,firstly,Chinese native translators should know clearly about the differences between Chinese and English thesis papers which have been caused by the different thinking modes between Eastern and Western in order to make C-E academic papers more understandable for target language readers.Secondly,an eligible translator should not only possess both Chinese and English language skills,but also need to jump out of the boundary of "continuous integration" thinking mode,try to translate in an "dualistically antithetic" way to enhance the quality of translation works.