Context And EST Translation

EST (English for Science and Technology) is a specific style of English widely used in scientific and technical fields. EST has drawn much attention of the whole world since the late 1970's, and quite a few scholars both at home and aboard have done a great deal of special research on it. Nowadays, the scientific technology of the whole world has developed by leaps and bounds, in this situation, the great assistance of EST translation into Chinese on the progress of the science and technology of China has been ever increasing.The initial stage of EST study mainly focused on the superficial level such as the word formation, grammatical structure and voice, which was just the static analysis of register. Correspondingly, the traditional EST translation study merely paid attention to the word and sentence translation, and concentrated on such perspectives as vocabulary, grammar and professional knowledge. Though it was theoretically meaningful, some problems also arose along with them. For instance, some translations are hard to understand or ambiguous, and mistakes, ignorance of the target text are common. One of the greatest important reasons is the lack of the study of context.Context, that is the language environment, refers to series of subjective and objective factors that have influence on the meaning and expression, and is the basis of language communication. To the late 1960s, with the rising and development of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, great progress has been made in the overseas linguistic circle. Translation, in effect, is an interlingual information transmission process which should be dependent on context. Therefore, the significant role context plays in EST translation can never be overlooked. To date, however, little attention has been paid to this aspect. This paper tries to study EST translation from the perspective of context and focuses on the restriction and influence of context on EST translation. It firstly introduces the definition, history, functions and classification of context, and then based on the characteristics and translation criteria of EST translation, analyzes the EST translation lexically, syntactically and textually. For the convenience of study, based on some of classifications put forward by scholars from home and abroad, the author summarizes a classification that is in particular suitable for EST translation, that is, linguistic context and nonlinguistic context. Linguistic context consists of lexical context, syntactic context and textual context; non-linguistic context consists of social context, professional background context, and cultural context. Some special attention and attentive analysis will be devoted to the influence of social context and cultural context on EST translation that has seldom been discussed before.This paper will be somewhat significant both theoretically and practically. However, it is a new approach to probe into EST translation into Chinese from the perspective of context. Anyway, the author hopes heartily that it will provide a new field of vision of EST translation study, promote people's cognition of the essence of EST and so that improve the technical communications more effectively of China.