A Report On The English-to-Chinese Translation Of Electronic And Cyber Warfare:A Comparative Analysis Of The PLA And The Indian Army

With the soaring developments of science and technology,the cyber and the electromagnetic domains have become essential in modern warfare.Together with the Psychological Warfare,the Cyber Warfare and the Electronic Warfare are viewed as interconnected subcomponents of Information Warfare(IW).The developments of Cyber Warfare(CW)and Electronic Warfare(EW)capabilities in the battlefields could confer overwhelming military superiority.In July 2019,the famous Indian think tank Observer Research Foundation(ORF)released an Occasional Paper(OP)titled Electronic and Cyber Warfare: A Comparative Analysis of the PLA and the Indian Army.This report is based on the translation of the OP.Published by a semi-official think tank with close ties to the Indian government,this OP explores how Cyber Warfare and Electronic Warfare capabilities intersect in land operations by People‘s Liberation Army(PLA)of China and the Indian Army(IA).It analyzes the complementarities,similarities and differences between Cyber Warfare and Electronic Warfare as well as strategic studies experts‘ views on the relationship between the two kinds of wars.It is of great strategic significance to study Cyber Warfare and Electronic Warfare capabilities of the Indian Army against the background of the current tense border relations between China and India.This OP is a text of Military English for Science and Technology(MEST),dotted with a large number of military terms and complex sentence structures.Besides,it employs plenty of parentheses,which makes the sentence patterns flexible and diversified,the language more expressive,and the sentence meaning more accurate and complete.Yet at the same time,these parentheses also disrupt the sentence structure,the continuity of meaning and logical thinking,and bring about many difficulties to the translator.With parentheses being one of the distinct features of the text,this report will focus on the translation of parentheses and try to suggest some applicable techniques.After a thorough comparison between the features of parentheses in both English and Chinese in terms of constituents,positioning and functions,their grammatical functions and semantic features become clear in these two languages.Both Chinese and English parentheses have the auxiliary function of supplementing information,but their forms are different,and the ways of thinking indicated in English and in Chinese are greatly different,so the forms of parentheses cannot be fully retained in translation.Based on the grammatical functions and forms of parentheses in this OP as well as the differences between English and Chinese,several translation methods are proposed in the end,such as keeping brackets,adding brackets,pre-positioning,embedding,division and reversion.