On Translation of Prolonged Sentences in EST 下载本文

can be a breakthrough point for analysis. In long sentences, among different ingredients, the easiest to identify is predicate verbs, because they have varieties in person, number and tense and cannot be omitted. Therefore, translators can start from it, find out how many predicate verbs are there and the relevant subject, break the long sentence down into several simple ones and finally distinguish the inner relationship among them according to the connectives. Here comes an example:

In obstructive sleep apnea sufferers, the muscle relaxation that comes with sleep allows the soft tissue of the throat and esophagus to close, shutting off the sleeper’s air passage. (D.T. Max, 2010: 71)

Overall, there appear four verbs—“comes”, whose corresponding subject is the muscle relaxation; “allows”, which is in coherence to sleep; “close”, as is in the charge of the soft tissue; and “shutting off”, which is determined by “who reported basic symptoms of depression”. Hence the whole sentence can be divided into four sense groups. And each of them forms a simplified meaning. By thorough and comprehensive analysis of the source language text, accurate comprehension can be guaranteed as “在阻塞型睡眠呼吸终止症患者身上,因为呼吸造成的肌肉放松会让咽喉和食道的软组织闭合起来,阻塞睡眠者的呼吸道”.

D. Inserting

To avoid a mixture in sentence sequencing, during translation, translators can use dashes, parentheses or two commas so as to insert some less important ingredients into the main clause.

E.g. One question is the extent to which wiping out bad bacteria, through antibiotics and extreme hygiene in hospitals, can be counterproductive if it also destroys the good, protective bugs.

(http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/68a595a6-627a-11e1-872e-00144feabdc0.html) This sentence has five sense groups. However, adopting inserting can make its translation as simple as “一个问题是,当通过抗生素和医院里的极端卫生措施消灭坏细菌时,会在多大程度上产生反效果(因为对人体有保护作用的好细菌可能同时也被消灭掉了)”. (http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001043617)

To all these above mentioned techniques, literally translation is prior to free translation because the transferred message should not only carry the original content but also be

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faithful to the original form. However, when there is no happy compromise between meaning and formality, the priority should go to meaning, which means form should be generally sacrificed for the sake of content. “Nida once mentioned five occasions when changes of form are necessary, which is a helpful conference and guidance in translation practice:

(1) When keeping the form leads to misunderstanding of the source text

(2) When literally borrowing foreign expression gives rise to resultant semantic gap (3) When correspondence in form brings about fuzziness in meaning

(4) When correspondence in form causes misunderstandings against the original text (5) When keeping the form leads to the conflict in the grammar and style between source text and TT”. (郭娴, 2010: 14)

No matter which skill translators will use among amplification, omission, conversion or structure adjustment to accomplish a literally or free translation, the translated Chinese EST version should be integrated into the original professional context, right in the logic relationship, word choices, word emotional coloring etc. To this point, the translation is able to move beyond “faithfulness” and finally arrive at “smoothness”.

IV. Conclusion

Since the application of the reform and opening up policy, China has become more open than ever before and exerted every effort to catch up with the development of the world?s advanced science and technology. Therefore, an easy access to the information on advanced science and technology is of great help in our absorbing modern technology. It is natural that EST has attracted more and more attention and that its Chinese translation becomes increasingly important. Whereas, it is not easy to make the version that satisfying especially when dealing with prolonged sentences which often appear in an EST essays.

The author of this thesis first illustrates the definition of EST and gives details to its features from three perspectives: vocabulary, sentence pattern and type of writing. Then, the author elaborates the techniques aimed to solve problems occurring in general long sentence?s translation, namely, synchronizing, reversing, division and recasting. All these can be helpful, but as a special text type which is quite science-loaded or technique-loaded, EST language has its own characteristics in both Chinese and English. Thus, four specific

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kinds of skills of EST long sentence translation have been ascertained in this thesis, which are amplification, omission, conversion and structure adjustment. To make them vivid, the author verifies these skills by applying detailed examples. The above findings in this thesis will attach great importance for the EST translators so that they can acquire better ways of producing EST versions and achieve efficient translation regardless of how many prolonged sentences there will be.

Bibliography

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