A Report On The E-C Translation Of U.S. Government Global Food Security Strategy (Excerpts)

U.S.Government Global Food Security Strategy is an official government document guiding the specific operations of U.S.government to solve food security issue with international cooperation from the year 2017 to 2020.The source text of the translation project is an excerpt of Chapter One,Four and Five from this strategy.Chapter One clarifies the global context of imperative food security issue and the international cooperation results achieved so far.Chapter Four proposes a series of coping approaches of the U.S.government.Chapter Five illustrates the measuring system of MEL to monitor the operation process.The significance of this project,the related translation strategies and techniques adopted in translation are elaborated in this report through examples.The source text embodies the characteristics of formal,rigorous and logic wording and phrasing.Professional agriculture-related background information and terminologies can be found in the whole source text frequently.Hence all the three factors of faithfulness,smoothness and readability are important and essential.Under the guidance of Toury’s theory of translation norms,the significance of this translation project and the choice of source text are illustrated explicitly by preliminary norms.Initial norms identify the main translation strategy of balance between “adequacy”and “acceptability”.According to Toury’s operational norms,multiple translation techniques are adopted to achieve the balance of “adequacy” and “acceptability”proposed by Toury.On lexical level,techniques such as amplification,omission and conversion of parts of speech are applied to render a coherent and idiomatic text that conforms to target norms.On syntactic level,techniques of syntactic linearity and annotation intend to achieve faithfulness.Other techniques such as restructuring and conversion of voice attempt to make the translated text more intelligible for target readers.All of the translation techniques employed are essential tools to achieve the balance between faithfulness and readability.By analyzing the specific examples in this translation practice,the translator concludes that Toury’s theory of translation norms plays a critical role in rendering official documents containing professional agriculture information.