The Internet Search In The English-Chinese Translation Of Art History Papers

Translation technology,in a broad sense,refers to all the information technologies that are conducive to translators' work.The Internet is an essential tool for contemporary translators.Translators can instantly obtain a variety of information through the Internet and solve certain problems after analyzing and screening the relevant information.In the translation project for the 34th World Congress of Art History(CIHA)in Beijing,I translated some art history papers that were submitted to the Chinese CIHA Committee and encountered various difficulties such as the translation of proper nouns,of terminology and of non-English foreign-language proper nouns.Considering that the translation project is difficult,time-consuming and burdensome,I used multiple Internet search techniques for the sake of convenience and efficiency,and managed to acquire enough useful online resources instead of paper materials.The aim of this report is,through analysis of typical examples,to explore how to choose appropriate Internet search techniques to tackle the difficulties in translating art history papers from English to Chinese.This report first introduces the principles of search engines' keyword search services,the Internet's three major functions in Internet-assisted Translation(IAT),and the three steps of the Internet search engine-assisted translation,and then analyzes the representative search techniques such as "dichotomy of the Internet search",four types of "keywords",and six kinds of "inducing words for the Internet search".This report summarizes four steps of doing Internet search for the translation of art history papers:(a)analyzing the source text(ST),(b)determining the searching method and searching,(c)evaluating the search results and selecting correct or appropriate translation solutions or target-language(TL)expressions,and(d)checking out these selected ones and finalizing the translation.In this translation project,I used comprehensively the above-mentioned techniques and followed these four steps to solve certain problems(i.e.,back translation,the translation of philosophical terms,and the translation of non-English foreign-language proper nouns).I hope to provide other translators with new ideas on how to use Internet search techniques in the process of translating from foreign languages into Chinese the texts that have similar features to art history papers.