Translationof oil and gas industry lexis

Аннотация

—This work reveals a correlation of factors determining the adequacy of oil and gas lexis translation from English into Russian. They govern decision-making processes when translators choose between the two basic strategies (domestication and foreignization) limited by discursive practices and cognitive structures of source texts. When used within a specific type of discourse, specialized lexical units obtain influential characteristics affecting the choice of translation strategies, but in many cases these discursive parameters are not taken into account, as foreignization strategy predominates in specialized vocabulary translation. However, domestication strategy appears to be more effective in particular cases. We argue that discursive and cognitive analysis resulting in conscious strategy choice will allow translators to make adequate decisions about oil and gas lexis translation methods, as they also correspond to translation strategies: the strategy of foreignization leads to translation techniques that preserve formal characteristics of original lexical units, while the strategy of domestication imposes semantic and functional methods of translation. Consequently, the study presents a translation algorithm for specialized lexis in oil and gas source texts to bolster the decision-making effectiveness and to increase translation adequacy in target tests. The algorithm is based on discourse- cognitive approach drawing the connections between alternative discursive parameters representing different types of knowledge by means of oil and gas lexical units and translation strategies with correlating translation techniques. Keywords — iction, online workshop, foundation, depiction, nostalgically, evocative details, common folk, triannually. 1. INTRODUCTION The research focuses on lexical aspects of specialised texts translation. Living in the world of multilingual communication, experts often face problems of specialized lexis translation and systematization of industry-specific lexical units. The fact that the European Union has the annual budget of one billion Euro to optimize communication in education, science, and technology proves this issue to be urgent. The biggest part of this allocation funds terminology management projects to control this problematic and controversial sphere of speech activity. 2. MAIN PART On the one hand, terminology has a long tradition of studying that can be expressed with the words of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, a French naturalist of the 18th century who wrote, “It is impossible to separate neither science from terminology nor terminology from science because every science has its three essential elements: a number of facts that constitute its scientific content, the representations or notions of these facts, and the terms expressing these notions”. On the other hand, the main characteristic of terms, i.e. their relation to scientific concepts and technical objects, is a problematic field for terminology management, since the development of these concepts, as well as the nomination of technological innovations are uncontrollable in most cases. Terminology starts chaotically, so terms often are not systematically arranged even within one language and one science. Thus, the concept “term” comes from the Latin root “to limit”. In other words, it is necessary to take control of something that is almost impossible to control. The EU efforts to implement the policy of multilingualism, aimed both at efficiency improvement of cross-language communication and at preservation of national and cultural specifics of languages, led to creation of various management tools applied to terminological sphere. These tools allow scholars to address a number of practical issues, for example, to permit or not permit the use of a term, variations of the same term, or variations of the same term as different parts of speech. Consequently, the most important aspects of terms creation are fixed in industry-specific standards, glossaries, patents and specifications, compiled by both national and international teams of experts. These sources have become the foundation to create terminological databases. For example, in 1975, the EU experts created a terminology database known as Eurodicautom. Its aim was to save time and efforts made by translators and other staff of the European Commission. In 2007, Eurodicautom was replaced with another tool called IATE (Inter-Active Terminology for Europe) that is a multilingual database of terms used in documents of the European Union. The purpose of the project, launched in 1999, was to give access to all terminology resources of the EU providing information and supporting the standards among the EU bodies. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has also created conceptual and terminological database, using original standards and their official translations. However, it is not always possible to apply all these achievements of terminology managem