A Report On Translating Technical Requirements For Runway And Ancillary Works Of The Samoa Capital Airport

The translation material Technical Requirements for Runway and Ancillary Works of the Samoa Capital Airport is a part of the bidding documents,which mainly aims at clarifying the rights and obligations of the owner and the contractor,specifying the specific works contents and implementation plans and providing complete and clear information to the bidders in a formal and objective language.The translation was completed under the commission of the China Railway * Group.From the perspective of Newmark’s Text Type Theory,the source text mainly belongs to the information-based text,with an obvious information function.Newmark believes that communicative translation should be adopted for information-based texts and that communicative translation is a translation method that attaches importance to the transmission of textual context,which requires the translator to make the translation as smooth and fluent as possible to be capable of being easily understood by the target readers and effectively conveying information.Bidding documents,which belongs to the legal genre,with the characteristics of some expressive texts.The source text,accurately conveying the intention of tenders,and containing a large amount of specialized terms and knowledge,can only be translated accurately,faithfully and smoothly by means of both semantic translation and communicative translation.A case study is adopted in this report to specifically explore the application of semantic translation and communicative translation at the lexical level and syntactic level in the translation of Technical Requirements for Runway and Ancillary Works of the Samoa Capital Airport.It is argued that,at the lexical level,semantic translation should be chosen for specialized terms and abbreviations etc.First by consulting paper dictionaries,electronic dictionaries and related parallel texts,and then choosing the most faithful and accurate meanings according to the context.While there are a lot of differences between English and Chinese vocabulary,which require the translator to ponder carefully when translating,communicative translation can be used for part-of-speech conversion or amplification or omission if necessary,the translation can be made to be more in line with the Chinese convention and to achieve better communication.At the syntactic level,there are also great differences in syntactic structure between English and Chinese.If translated only on the basis of semantic translation and according to the corresponding order of grammatical components,the translation will often become awkward and difficult to comprehend.Therefore,communicative translation is often used to adjust the sentential structure and order of the original text in order to make the translation conform to the Chinese sentence pattern.Some translation techniques are mentioned in the case study,such as division,restructuring and the change of voices.Finally,the report draws the conclusion that semantic translation and communicative translation need to be used alternately in translation practice,some parts should be semantically translated,while some other parts should be communicatively translated,that is,semantic translation and communicative translation should be combined to ensure the target text’s fluency as well as its fidelity and faithfulness to the source text.Specifically speaking,the source text,which belongs to the legal genre and is an informational text type,can be semantically translated in most cases,though it should be communicatively translated in some other cases considering the large number of complicated sentences and some unique collocation in it.