A Corpus-Assisted Study On The Mechanism Of E-C Translation Of Compound Nouns In Scientific And Technological Neologisms

The rapid development of science and technology has contributed to the emergence of English neologism. Words formed through compounding which functions as one of the most powerful word formation methods has accounted for the majority. As for compounding words, the group of compound nouns is the largest due to its distinct organization and great combination capability. Therefore, it is of great significance to conduct studies on the translation of English compound nouns in scientific and technological neologism.Questions still remain to be addressed although it has received much concerns:firstly, as regards to the research method, more attention has been paid to the qualitative than the quantitative method; secondly, most of the new English compound nouns illustrated in previous studies have already made their way into dictionaries; thirdly, predecessors mainly focused on the word formations instead of translation strategies and only several general translation strategies such as literal translatioin, transliteration and free translation were put forward; fourthly, fewer scholars have ever extended to the new English compound nouns.Words are known to be created in particular ways. Although English and Chinese both have their own means to produce new words, they also share common features that lay solid foundations to conduct comparative studies on them. As a resutl, the present study attempts to summarize differences and similarities of the word formations and syntactic relations of new English and Chinese compound nouns assisted by the linguistic corpus developed independently through a self-developed computer software. In this way do we hope to conclude seven C-E translation strategies, including positive sequence, inversion, partial translation, zero translation, addition and reduction, pictographic translation and comprehensive translation in order to figure out the mechanism of translating English compound nouns in scientific and technological neologism.The thesis is structured as follow:firstly, new English compound nouns will be collected by a computer software developed independently. Secondly, both the quantitative and qualitative methods should be adopted. Thirdly, in accordance with their structures, compounds nouns shall be divided into seven subgroups:noun+"verb", noun+doing, done+noun, adjective +doing, adverbial +doing, noun+noun, adjective +noun. From the perspective of their syntactic relations, compound nouns could further fall into five subgroups:subject and verb relation, object and verb relation, adverbial and head relation, attribute and head relation as well as coordinate relation. In conclusion, translation strategies should be discussed and mechanism should be elaborated.