A Report On The Translation Of UN Yearbook Express 1983-1988 (Excerpts) Under Skopos Thoery

The text of this E-C translation project is Yearbook Express,an official document of the United Nations which is formal and informative.Features of accuracy,clarity,conciseness and consistency are pursued in writing.Its content is objective and diverse,involving various issues of social development.These characteristics bring challenges to translation at the levels of comprehension,reproduction and quality control.Translation difficulties in this project include the comprehension of technical terms,general terms,function words and ambiguous information;the representation of passive voice,impersonal sentences and long complex sentences;as well as the quality control over the features of the source text.In order to produce a high-quality translation for the Department of Global Communications of the United Nations,the author tries to find solutions to translation difficulties on the basis of Skopos Theory,and systematic case analysis is conducted to supplement each of the solutions as well.At comprehension level,under the guidance of fidelity rule,the source text is comprehended accurately through parallel text reference,thorough understanding in context,identifying function words and logical judgments.At reproduction level,under the guidance of coherence rule,translation techniques such as inversion,conversion of ingredients,conversion of part of speech,amplification,combination,division and change of voice are applied to resolving translation difficulties coming from the differences between English and Chinese.At quality control level,under the guidance of the skopos rule,the features of the source text are regarded as both goals and means.The Chinese version of the UN Yearbook Express makes it more convenient for Chinese readers to know about United Nations organizations,systems and policies,as well as the international situation.The project report puts forward solutions to the translation difficulties through the comparative analysis between the first draft and the revised version of the target text,and summarizes how the Skopos Theory guides the English-Chinese translation of UN Yearbook Express.It is expected to provide a valuable reference for the E-C translations of the texts of similar types in the future.