No matter what kind of article translated, we would encounter the problem of style. So we must fully understand whether it is scientific article, legal article, introductory speech or an advertisement.

Because the article style is quite different in the form of expression, such as the legal style has some common used legal words, technology will have their own specialized terminology, practical articles sometimes has strict format requirements, literature is more complicated, because the dialogue ,description, psychological description, scenery or character description is separately different.

Besides style, another problem related is register. The so-called “language domain” (register) is a language with a specific purpose variants. We can divide a language from the field of communication, communicative approach and communication relations into different language domain.

Read Also: Long Sentences in Translation I

Such as from social status and social relationships, English can be divided into 5 types with cold body, the official body, discussion body, casual body, intimate body. Different variants are distinguished from language domain. Citing a few simple examples to illustrate for better understanding. Such as“汤姆病了，今天没去上学”, If translated into “ Tom didn’t go to school, because he was ill.”

This is a common core language, but if translated into “Tom was ill, so he didn’t go to school.” this is the colloquial, informal style. Or translated into “Being ill, Tom didn’t go to school.” and “Tom didn’t go to school because of illness.” Both of them are formal style which is not appropriate in such situation.

From above, we can see the causal clause expression is relatively normal, the sentence connected by “So” seems less formal, the abstract noun and participial phrases are obviously quite formal. Sometimes different expression with the same meaning also have register difference.

For example, “according to” and “in accord with”, the former is the common core language while the latter is in due form. Even the usage of articles can indicate such difference. As “The horse is a useful animal; A horse is a useful animal; Horses are useful animals.”

The 1st one used the definite article plus a singular noun that belongs to the formal usage, but the 2nd one used indefinite article with a singular noun added is classified into public core language, the last one, the plural represents the generic class considered as informal style. So, when we get the original source, to understand the register situation is really important. It determines how to select proper words or phrases during translation.

Access to as many as possible articles with different style or register, learning to compare and summarize difference between them, which would be beneficial to improve our language background as well as translation level.