认知负荷视角下的石油类学术论文英译汉断句

A Study on Sentence Segmentation in English to Chinese Translation of Petroleum Academic Papers from the Perspective of Cognitive Load

石油类英语学术论文信息量大,长句多,并且结构复杂。根据认知负荷理论中认知资源总量不变的原则,句中包含的信息组块过多时,处理信息所需要占用的认知资源就多,这将减少分配给其他任务——如记忆存储——的认知资源,从而降低阅读效率,增加理解难度。因而,在石油类学术论文英译汉时,汉语译文的适当断句,对于帮助译文读者提高阅读效率、理解文章内容至关重要。本文以石油类英语学术论文汉译为例,从认知负荷角度研究提高此类文本汉语译文可读性的断句方法。结果表明在译文中增加虚词、细化句子意群、拆分非谓语动词结构等方法能够有效减轻读者阅读时的认知负荷,从而提高译文的可读性。

English petroleum academic papers have their special features: informative, large numbers of long sentences and complex structures. According to the principle of limited total amount of attention in the Cognitive Load Theory, when there are too many information chunks in a sentence, more cognitive resources are needed to process information, which will reduce the cognitive resources allocated to other tasks, such as memory storage, thus reducing the reading efficiency and increasing the difficulty for readers to understand the texts. Therefore, in the process of translating petroleum academic papers into Chinese, proper sentence segmentations are very important for the readers to improve their reading efficiency and understand the texts. Taking the English to Chinese translation of petroleum academic papers as an example, this paper studies sentence segmentation methods to improve the readability of Chinese versions of these texts from the perspective of cognitive load. The results show that adding function words, separating sense groups of a sentence and translating the non-finite verbs individually will effectively reduce the cognitive load of readers and improve the readability of the translations.