The Use Of Prepositional Phrases In Chinese-English Translation Of Sci-tech Texts

With the rapid economic growth of our country and frequent international communication in oil field,the requirement for translation of petroleum technical texts,both in English and Chinese,is increasing.However,as it is difficult to control the quality of Chinese-English translation of petroleum technical papers,the way to improve translation quality becomes an urgent problem.This case study is based on The Specifications for project proposal on Evaluation Methods for Coal Reservoir Sensitivity,an informative text features in terms and experiment procedures which are difficult to translate accurately.Special features in contents,usages and functions of scientific papers are shown in terms of vocabulary,sentences and structures of texts.Common stylistic factors of scientific papers like accurate choice of words,objective in statements,rigorous structures,and technical terms are required to be demonstrated in target texts.The relation between words in English text is indicated by prepositions acting as screws in big machines,while the relation between Chinese characters is presented by the order of Chinese characters and its internal textual logic.Since various language features lead to various language frames,there should be a bridge to make up the difference between these two languages.After surveying documents and English parallel texts in petroleum science field,it can be drawn from the research that prepositions and prepositional phrases can be applied to reduce Chinglish influenced by translator's own language.Considering the characteristics of this translation project,this thesis mainly adopts the following research methods: documentary reference and analytic induction.This thesis,taking Dynamic Equivalence by Nida as the theoretical guidance,mainly focuses on analyzing two translation phenomena during Chinese-English translation process.One is that Chinese prepositional phrases could correspond to various English prepositions,the other is prepositional phrases would commonly appear in English translation version while there is no Chinese preposition in source-text sentence due to the multiple meanings of English prepositions and their flexible usages.These phenomena are not only in accordance with Nida's Dynamic Equivalence,but also contribute to improving translation quality,shortening sentences,meeting the requirement of target readers and avoiding sentence redundancy.