Use Of Parallel Text In Chinese-to-English Translation Of Academic Paper

Many translators have encountered translation problems such as lack of background knowledge,unfamiliarity with technical terms and jargons and no idea of how to choose sentence structures when they translated academic papers from Chinese to English.Few of them chose to solve these problems by making use of parallel texts.I faced the same problems as those translators and solved them by using parallel texts.To be specific,I was entrusted by a university teacher with Chinese-to-English translation work about a psychological paper titled An Exploration into How Subliminal Perception Affects Fast Reaction of Athletes.This paper is closely related to sports and cognition and the English version will be contributed to English journals,so the translation should be as specialized as possible.I finished translating the paper of 11,000 Chinese Characters within one month.During the work,I found I lacked background knowledge,knew little about psychological terms and jargons and felt at sea with the use of sentence structures and concluded the rules of how to use parallel texts to overcome these problems in Chinese-to-English translation of academic papers.I am going to demonstrate the rules in three parts: introduction to the translation project of the academic paper,the relation between parallel texts and academic papers and examples of using parallel texts in Chinese-to-English translation of academic papers.In the third part,different forms of parallel texts are used to solve three translation problems: lack of background knowledge,unfamiliarity with technical terms and jargons and no idea of how to choose sentence structures.The conclusion is that translators should collect and read parallel texts after they read the source texts but before they start translation;they should use various types of parallel texts to find the best translation of technical terms and jargons;when they have no idea of using which sentence structure,they should refer to the parallel texts which are similar to the source texts in style and even subject,but not just copy the sentences.