从海上石油钻井专用词语的翻译谈英语词汇生动性的保留

Translating Technical Terms without Sacrificing Their Inherent Vividness: The Rendition of Offshore Oil Drilling Terms as an Exemplar

一般人可能认为英语中的技术词汇不会很难翻译,以为只要有技术基础,翻译起来就会很容易。然而,事情并不总是这么简单,技术词语有时从表面上并看不出意思,甚至查字典也未必能得到帮助。这种难翻译的词语现象,常常是由英语词汇的生动性和随意性所带来的。这种现象在科技英语中普遍存在,而对于石油钻井专用词语来说,更是明显。作者通过对海上石油钻井专用英语词汇翻译问题的讨论,探讨了如何在译文中保留原词语的生动性的问题。

A special kind of difficulty one encounters in translating techno-scientific texts draws our attention to the fact that vividness and arbitrariness could also be among the lexical features of technical terms. Not infrequently, we come across terms in this area which are utterly incomprehensible, only to fred out later that they perplex simply because their formation does not follow any rule or law. Using the Chinese rendition of specialized terms in oil drilling industry as an exemplar, this paper discusses how the vividness of the original terms could be retained in their translations.