A Study Of C-E Translation Strategies For Medical Journal Abstracts:a Functional Approach

With the flourishing of life science and information science in21century, medical science develops dramatically, bringing out new theories and new techniques successively which result in enormous volume of medical papers published everyday. Accompany with China’s entry into WTO and its growing academic integration with the outside, English medical abstracts become very important in spreading medical knowledge, promoting international medical exchanges, as well as improving health care and medical education.This thesis attempts to make a study of C-E translation strategy for medical journal abstracts from the perspective of Newmark’s typology and Halliday’s metafunction. As a kind of translation activity, the translating of medical journal abstracts involves the interaction between the original writer, the translator and the target readers. So the translator should take the translation purpose, the text functions and the expectations of target readers into consideration during the target text construction, instead of just decoding the source text into English. The main functions of medical journal abstracts are to disseminate original information or innovative ideas about medical research, and to arouse readers’interest on them. So the translation should be accurate, objective, precise and clear, conforming to the convention norms of target language, while the source information is represented precisely in the target texts. According to Newmark’s typology, medical journal abstracts belong to informative texts. Informative function is predominant, and vocative function is supportive. Based on text functional analysis, this thesis puts forward the four translation principles for medical journal abstracts:the target reader-centered principle, the faithfulness principle, the conciseness principle and the principle of standardization. Associated with the text type of medical abstracts, communicative translation method is used as the leading principle for choosing strategy. Domestication is a strategy that "adopts a transparent, fluent style to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text for target language readers as accustomed to fluent translations that invisibly inscribe foreign texts with target language values and provide readers with the narcissistic experience to recognizing their own culture in a culture other". In this sense, domestication is probably a target-reader-centered translation in which expressions acceptable in the target culture are employed to make the translated texts comprehensible for target readers. The domestication is a suitable strategy according to the text function analysis and the translation principles. As a specific kind of domestication, rewriting refers to rearrange the content and structure of the source text to improve the readability of the target text. Medical journal abstracts, as a research-process genre, are composed of four indispensable parts to realize its communication goal. In order to achieve the overall goal, each of the four parts undertakes its own distinctive communicative function. So the translator should rewrite the four sections of source texts according to the different communicative functions proposed by Salager-Meyer. On micro level, the informative function and vocative function of medical journal abstracts are realized by the proper choosing of linguistic forms from the view of Halliday’s metafunction. The informative function is mainly realized by the ideational function of language. As a kind of ideational metaphor, nominalization can improve the lexical density and informativeness of abstract discourse. It is desirable to converse Chinese clauses into English phrases during the translation. The vocative function is realized by the interpersonal function of language. Hedging aims to deal with the interpersonal function of language, which explore the way to establish social relations through language use, on the other hand, it displays the genre characteristics of medical journal abstracts such as objectivity, precision, for it sets out to represent the experimental findings appropriately under discussion and results in a precise way. The hedge can help original writer to prevent from potential criticism as well as to pursue objectiveness and precision, so the translator should choose the proper English hedges to fulfill the intended purpose of original claims. The readability of medical journal abstracts is mainly realized by the textual function of language. The strategic arrangement of simple themes could help target readers get comprehensive understanding of the information, representing the main components of the texts in a straight way. And the attainment of natural information flow is a prerequisite for improving the target text. In order to make a good translation of medical abstracts, translators should not only master some basic translation skills, but also know some knowledge about functional grammar and discourse analysis, such as linguistic realization of textual functions, stylistic features, writing convention of target language and rules of medical writing.