MisakenElemensinTechnicalEnglishTranslaion---ACaseSudyofAuomobileEnglish_开题报告

一、文献综述

1

Background

   

With the rapid development of China’s science and technology comes surging demand for science and technology information. As domestic literatures are insufficient to meet the demand, it is imperative to turn to foreign ones, most of which are in English. In light of this, translation of English for science and technology (EST) is gaining importance, with the most important demand being the accuracy and standardization of the translation work. In translation practices, it is not uncommon to come across ambiguous works, expression, and even logic structures. These misleading factors lead to the issue of uneven quality among translated literatures, undermining the development of science and technology. EST covers many areas, with thorough interpretation difficult within the limits of the texts. Representative automobile English is chosen here as the subject of study, in an effort to shed light on issues related to EST translations. Various misleading factors are examined in this thesis, through scientific categorization and analysis, before proposing solutions based on referring to existing related studies.

 

2  

Research status

Recent years have seen a dwindling number of studies on automobile English translation with various causes. In Exploring the Stagnation of Progress Regarding EST Translations Studies, the causes are presented, which, to a certain extent, can also be applied to automobile English translations. First is theoretical study, the most focused area of research and study in the past 20-30 years. Initial studies focused on theories, with the then rapid development of EST translation drawing on theories from contemporary linguistics, including discourse analysis, lexicology, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, etc, and developing both in terms of depth and width. Translation studies ceased to be limited to looking at merely general theories, and began to pay more attention to texts and paragraphs, with more practical inclinations displayed. However, EST translation needs to be based on practical cases, instead of being solely about summarizing theoretical experiences. Case-based approaches failed to draw enough material from existing researches, leading to limited progress of EST translations. Without doubt, EST studies still enjoy a broad horizon. What is needed is just to build on linguistic and practical case studies, and integrate them with modern science and technologies, i.e. corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, which brings us to the second cause for stagnation-disconnection between theory and practice. Theoretical researchers often do not have abundant translation experience, with their studies being highly theoretical; translation practitioners are not familiarized with translation theories, or have no understanding of them at all. The result is when major breakthrough are achieved in translation, practices remain where they were; meanwhile, problems arising from practices cannot be timely addressed with theoretical researches, rendering the latter failing to keep up. Lastly, bilingual competence among researchers limits the outcome of translation studies. Lack of practice by researchers combined with insufficient participation into researches by qualified practitioners, result in discrepancies of research outcomes. EST translation involves at least two languages, requiring researchers to be familiarized with characteristics of both languages and to be professional in their fields of expertise. But the reality is the majority of English major don’t end up working in related industries while science and technology workers do not have sufficient understanding about English. Those that meet both criteria are few and far between, keeping the quality and quantity of translation studies from continuously improving. 

3 Approach 

  

Based on the above analysis, I kicks off by scouring for automobile English translation related researches in major databases, before integrating findings for systematic and thorough investigation. Then efforts are made to extract related results on the subject, supplement them with theoretical support, and design corresponding research framework. 

In the mean time, on top of theoretical studies, efforts shall be made to translate materials as much as possible. The study focuses on analyzing problems arising from translation practices. Therefore, a large number of practices are necessary to extract patterns, for specific angles to be decided to find out solutions based on science and technology principles. This study shall serve as reference to translation practices, and a basis for further related studies. More exploration then is called for to unveil all aspects of ECT translations. 

Taking automobile English translation as the subject, factors leading to translation errors are examined to find out solutions and improve the quality of translation works. Three aspects will be analyzed: misleading vocabularies, misleading sentences, and misleading paragraph structures. Acting on the three angles, the categorization of issues based on discovered patterns shall be carried out, to come up with respective solutions. In the end, lessons extracted shall be transferred to EST translations, in a hope to contributing to a more mature development of translation practices.

二、^范文提纲

Contents

AbstractIII

1  Introduction1

2  Literature Review3

2.1 Domestic Studies3

2.2 Foreign Studies4

2.3 Research Plans4

3  Analysis of the Misleading Elements in Automobile English Translation5

3.1 At Lexical Level5

3.1.1 Polysemy5

3.1.2 Various Terms6

3.1.3 Abbreviations/Acronyms6

3.1.4 Other Cases7

3.2 At Syntactic Level7

3.2.1 Conjunctions7

3.2.2 Pronouns8

3.2.3 Mix of Conjunctions and Pronouns9

3.2.4 Other Cases9

3.3 At Textual Level10

4   Solution Proposals Concerning Translation11

4.1 Defining Terminologies11

4.2 Clarifying Sentences12

4.3 Controlling Paragraphs12

5  Conclusion14

5.1 Major Findings of the Study14

5.2 Limitation of the Study14

5.3 Suggestion for Further Research15

References16

三、参考文献

（10篇以上）

References

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[2]  Pexman, P.M., & Lupker, S.J.(1999). Ambiguity and visual word recognition: Can feedback explain both homophone and polysemy effects? Ottawa: Canadian Psychological Association.

[3] Pexman, P.M., et al.(2001). Homophone effects in lexical decision. 27 (1), 136 -196.

[4] Sun, H.(2005). Translation technology and translation quality: The use of machine translation and computer-assisted translation and its implications for translation quality control. Masters Abstracts International. Retrieved January 6,2013, from ProQuest database.

[5] Zhao, H.(2006). Teaching Automotive English to Translator and Interpreter Students: Course design at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology. English for Specific Purposes, 8(23), 1-26.

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[10] 邵迎春( Shao Y. ). (2012).汽车专业英语特点分析.《大学教育》, 4:38-43.

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