A Study Of The Unit Of Translation For EST Text

The necessity of determining a reasonable unit of translation (or translation unit, UT) has been widely acknowledged for simplifying the complicated task of translation. As English-Chinese scientific and technical translation is increasingly becoming a topic of much concern, it is quite necessary to establish such a UT in the first place. However, most of the previous studies probed into this issue in generalities without going into this specific field. With an eye to this inadequacy, this thesis makes an applied study on E-C scientific and technical translation units, tries to propose suitable ones and testifies to the proposition through theoretical analyses and real practices.Firstly, the author critically introduces previous studies, and points out that UT is operationally a linguistic unit; all linguistic units like phoneme, morpheme, word, idiom, free phrase, sentence, paragraph and even text are all likely to be UT from a dynamic point of view. Based on former achievements, the author stresses the essential differences between these hierarchical units, and provides a new definition for UT: a translation unit is a linguistic unit in the source language which the translator chooses to treat as a single unit for the purpose of translation; it possesses its equivalent parts in the target language, while its composing parts may or may not have equivalents in the target language. The size of the linguistic units translators operate with is decided by the nature of the text, and by the strategy and technique chosen by the translator accordingly.Then, with a description of the stylistic features of scientific and technical texts, based on Halliday's study on coherence and cohesion, and thematic progression, the author analyzes the merits and demerits of the various levels of UT. Expounded are the theoretic bases, analyzed are translation practices based on translators' awareness of paragraph. Exploration on the techniques of the English-Chinese translation is carried out. With conceptual and empirical research, the thesis concludes that technical translators start from sentence, rearrange inner meaning blocks, and possess paragraph awareness tend to produce faithful and fluent translation.This study may finally lead to a theory of UT in the field of scientific and technical translation and hopefully drive at a more extensive study.