| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 翻譯學研究所在職專班 === 97 === Abstract
The major purpose of this research is to study the effect of different translation methods of translating English scientific textbook into Chinese on the comprehension ability of readers. No one would deny the fact that translated science textbooks may benefit students’ learning of scientific knowledge; however, from most people’s experience, most of the translations are difficult to comprehend. For this reason, there is indeed a need to find out whether such incomprehensibility is caused by the method of literal translation and whether communicative translation is better suited for scientific articles.
To address above-mentioned questions, this research is designed as the following steps. First, four Chinese scientific articles which appear to be translated literally were selected as the literal translation texts, and the translation of the same four articles applying Nida’s theory and Newmark’s method was taken as the liberal translation texts. Then, multiple-choice tests based on these two types of translation texts were designed, and a pilot study was conducted to help refine the tests. A total of 100 freshmen of engineering major were divided into two groups: one group was directed to read the literal translation texts and the other read the liberal translation texts, both within a same period of time. Then, tests were given to the students of those two groups to assess their understanding of the contents of the texts. In addition, after the test, selective interviews were conducted with some of the students to elicit more specific information about their understanding of the contents of the translations.
After the analysis of the test using the SPSS program, the results showed that the differences between the two groups were significant and that the students reading the liberal translation texts had better comprehension than those reading the literal translation texts. It can be concluded that the method of translation do affect readers’ comprehension level and that liberal translation tends to be more comprehensible. The results also indicate that Nida’s theory and Newmark’s method are practically useful for scientific textbook translation and that literal translation tends to cause more misunderstanding, and long sentence constructions are apt to create confusion.
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