A Study On Translation Strategies Of Prepositions In Scientific Texts

Thanks to maturity of microwave remote sensing technologies,dramatic changes have taken place in the fields of artificial satellites, manned spaceflight and lunar exploration. Therefore, these technologies have become the focal point of development and research that most countries all over the world are rushing for.Microwave Radar and Radiometric Remote Sensing is a typical scientific textbook in English and it is designed not only to cover the theoretical models, system design and operation,and applications of microwave remote sensing systems but also to present reasoning processes and experiments of the theoretical models with experimental observations. In order to deliver information about science and technology accurately and concisely, a great number of sentence components made up of prepositions and notional words are employed in the textbook, which take up most of the scientific text. Thus,correct translation of the prepositions contributes to accurate delivery of scientific information. Furthermore, in the process of translation, prepositions impress the author of this report the most although they challenge her to some extent.With translation of prepositions as a main line and Relevance Theory as a theoretical basis, this report is carried out based on the translation of Volume-Scattering Models and Land Observations, one chapter from Microwave Radar and Radiometric Remote Sensing, and is composed of five chapters. Chapter One presents background information about microwave remote sensing technologies and scientific translation as well as English prepositions. Chapter Two analyzes the source,content and requirements of the translation project of Microwave Radar and Radiometric Remote Sensing. Chapter Three describes the three procedures of the translation task, including pre-task work, while-task work and post-task work. This report gives full priority to Chapter Four, in which five location types of prepositions in syntactic structures are generalized and three translation strategies for prepositions in scientific texts are proposed under the guidance of Relevance Theory, including usage of punctuation marks, adjustment of word orders and conversion of vocabularies. The last chapter is the conclusion to the translation of Microwave Radar and Radiometric Remote Sensing. In the end, it is pointed out that translators should pay attention to the translation of prepositions in English for Science and Technology (EST) so as to improve translation quality.