Genre-based Analysis Of Petroleum Technical English Texts And Their Translation Strategies

With the development of the oil economy,the translation of Petroleum Technical English has been paid more and more attention to.Petroleum Technical English texts,as an independent genre,have attracted much attention from linguists,stylisticians,rhetoricians,and translators.Starting with the intensive study of Petroleum Technical English texts,the thesis is intended to provide some guidance for its translation practice.Literature review shows that the former research focuses more on the study of Petroleum Technical English texts from the microscopic point of view,such as the translation of long sentences,the use of professional vocabularies,figures of speech and passive voice,etc.Few scholars work on the Petroleum Technical English texts with related theories in the framework of genre analysis.In this paper,the author makes a tentative analysis of Petroleum Technical English texts from the perspective of genre analysis with a view to providing a new approach or method of deciphering texts and translation.At the first stage of the study,the author tries to define Petroleum Technical English texts as a separate genre according to the definition proposed by Swales(1990)and then makes specific classifications.In view of the massive data and practicality in the present research,this paper mainly studies four categories of Petroleum Technical English texts,which are abstracts of petroleum thesis,petroleum technical news,petroleum popular science and petroleum product specification.The author makes a genre-based analysis of these four texts and the result shows that each text has its own identifiable moves at the macro level,through which the communicative purposes of the Petroleum Technical English texts are achieved.In the case of petroleum literature review,a comparative study based on Swales' CARS model is presented based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis.According to the study,the author finds each move and move orders in petroleum literature review and summarizes the textualfeatures in petroleum literature review.At the second stage of the study,the author finds that different texts have different writing purposes through the analysis of four kinds of Petroleum Technical English texts and thus provide a potential for further summing-up of textual features of different texts.It is proved that the characterization of the genre-based textual features necessitates a better approach to translation.Hence,the author finds it possible and feasible to apply different translation strategies with different texts.Because of the differing kinds of texts,the four kinds of abstracts of petroleum,petroleum technical news,petroleum popular science and petroleum product specification enjoy their own translation strategies to make better reading for both Chinese and English translation.