A Report On The Translation Of The Limits Of Expertise: Rethinking Pilot Error And The Causes Of Airline Accidents(Excerpts)

This is a translation project report.The text chosen for translation is the introduction of 19 major aircraft accidents caused by human factors.The Limits of Expertise: Rethinking Pilot Error and the Causes of Airline Accidents was compiled by Dismukes,a NASA scientist who specializes in human factors.This report has translated the book’s introduction and the occurrence of one accident.The most distinctive features of the selected text are its objective descriptions,strong logic thinking,and relatively complex structure with long sentences.Meanwhile,a large number of long sentences bring some difficulties to translation.There are a lot of references in the source text,especially demonstrative references,such as the definite article “the” and the pronoun “this”.They have different representations in translation.Therefore,with the help of the cohesion theory of Halliday & Hassan,this report discusses the translation methods of reference in a large number of long and difficult sentences in the source text.The report uses the method of statistics to discuss the preservation and change of references in translation.According to the statistics,in the source text,demonstrative reference accounts for the highest proportion(74.4%)followed by personal reference(20.0%)and comparative reference(5.6%).What’s more,the personal reference in English is less than that in Chinese.When it comes to demonstrative reference,the definite article accounts for a large proportion in the original English text and the Chinese translation is dominated by the singular referential pronoun.The main significance of this report is to provide some enlightenment for the translation of long sentences in civil aviation texts and provide some reference value for the development of aviation information-based text translation.