The Translation Of Noun Phrases In English For Science And Technology

This report is based on the translation of A Guide to Coalbed Methane Reservoir Engineering,a guidebook on coalbed methane exploration and production,published by the U.S.Gas Research Institute(GRI).Noun phrases predominantly represent the features of scientific English,namely accuracy and conciseness.However,they bring a lot of problems to the translation practice as well.This report takes the translation of the noun phrase as the object of the study,trying to summarize proper translation methods under different conditions.This report first takes the Communicative Translation of Newmark's Translation Theory as the theoretical guidance,differentiating it from other similar concepts and arguing its rationality in the study of noun phrase translation.Then all the noun phrases in the translation project are categorized by their grammatical structures so as to provide convenience for the summary of translation methods.This report argues that the function of noun phrases in informational texts is mainly about textual function,so that the translation of noun phrases is to seek the equivalence between original language readers and target language readers in reference to their expression effects.Noun phrases can be divided into three categories,namely the simple noun phrases,the compound noun phrases and the nominalized noun phrases.The translation strategy of the three types of nouns phrases are analyzed in this report based on the typical examples.The stylistic features of English for Science and Technology leave significant influence on translation,thus it is of great value for technical translators to study how to handle the structure features of noun phrases in technical texts,and how to make the translation show the same technical texts features,namely the deliberate structure,the precise concept,the concise and fluent writing,and the strong objectivity,etc.This report aims to provide reference for the related translation,and the specific features of noun phrases in discourses should still be taken into consideration before apply the summarized translation methods.