How to Do Thesis Translation well?

With the development of technology and science in the past century, Language for Science and Technology as a new style has developed into an important style and attracted much attention from 1970s. Statistics shows that more than 99% of theses are trying to solve a scientific problem; and as far, the language style is concerned, most of theses share the features of the Language for Science and Technology. Therefore, if you want to do an excellent job in thesis translation, you must bear in mind the basic characteristics of Language for Science and Technology, and try to make the most of them. The most outstanding features of Language for Science and Technology mainly include wide use of scientific terms, frequently used sentences patterns and complex discourse structure. In accordance with such features, generally speaking, thesis translation shall accord great importance to the accuracy in translating scientific terminology, the commonly used sentence patterns, the analysis of the deeper structure of the discourse, and a wider accumulation of scientific knowledge.

  First and foremost, accurate translation of scientific terminology shall be paid much more attention to if you want to achieve excellence in thesis translation. Usually, scientific theses contain a large amount of scientific terms. These terms have very strict scientific denotations in a specific branch of scientific learning. For example, the English word “splash” is a commonly used word in daily language meaning “spread of drops of water”, but when it is borrowed by the space science, its meaning is transformed to “to land in water, especially in the ocean, after a space flight”. On the other hand, the same word usually tends to mean differently when it is used in different scientific fields. For instance, the word “transmission” means “launching, broadcasting” in radio engineering, “speed change” in mechanics, and “inheritance” in medical science. Therefore, it is very easy for you to confuse different meanings of the same word in different thesis translation if you do not keep reminding yourself of these features of the Language for Science and Technology.

  Second, getting familiar with the commonly used sentence patterns in Language for Science and Technology is also very important in thesis translation. Grammatically speaking, Language for Science and Technology has very specific preference in choosing sentence patterns. To take English language as an example again, English for Science and Technology is characterized by nominalization, widely usage of words depicting action, process, phenomenon, and development, frequent use of present tense, passive voice, and non-finite verbs, etc. Among these features, the dominancy of passive voice in scientific thesis is very typical. For example, the sentence patterns like “it is said/believed that…”, “it has been proved that…”, “it is suggested that…” are widely used in scientific writing like thesis to show that the opinion is not biased. In one word, to familiarize yourself with these commonly used sentence patterns in Language for Science and Technology can improve your working efficiency while you are doing thesis translation.

  In addition, making a deeper analysis of the discourse structure is also necessary in thesis translation because sentence patterns in theses are usually complicated and involve many relations. For one thing, in scientific discourse like thesis, the commonly used sentence patterns usually have some variations and extensions. For another thing, the relations between sentences or clauses include not only grammatical relations, but also thematic relations. It is well known that logic is uppermost element in a thesis because the author can not prove his or her point without the help of logic. Hence, for you as a translator, to analyze the discourse deeper and clarify the sentence relations both grammatically and thematically can help you make a best understanding of the logic used by the author so as to ensure the translated version of the thesis can observe the same logic too. Otherwise, your thesis translation may go astray and lead to confusion.

  Lastly, to accumulate scientific knowledge widely is of importance in that it can help translators to achieve the greatest objectivity and make the translation errors fall to the lowest level in thesis translation.

  To make a summary, scientific writings like theses usually involve a more comprehensive research and professional understanding of a specific scientific field, so thesis translation have much higher requirements for the translators in grasp of words, discourse comprehension, and knowledge accumulation. 

Author Information:

Marcia

Translator of

Transhorsa Translation Co., LTD., Shanghai

http://www.transhorsa.org

Native translator & Proofreading 

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