The E-C Translation Report Of MOOC Internet Of Things: How Did We Get Here

This article is an English-Chinese translation practice report of Coursera MOOC Internet of Things: How did we get here provided by the University of California,San Diego.MOOCs have become an indispensable part of the complementary mode of education,and a large number of English MOOCs urgently need to be translated.As a Coursera translator volunteer,the translator selected and translated 40 videos of this MOOC,covering the main technologies of the Internet of Things and communication industries and their industry development history.This translation practice is guided by Katharina Reiss’ s text typology theory and the audiovisual translation theory.The source text of this task belongs to informative text,and the primary mission of this type of text is to wholly and faithfully convey the information in the source text.MOOC translation also has the features of audiovisual translation and is polysemiotic.Therefore,in addition to the source language subtitles,conveying information on the video screen is also indispensable.This report summarizes MOOC translation features,analyzes representative cases,discusses four types of difficulties encountered in translation practice activities,and suggests corresponding solutions.Extension and replacement are adopted to translate incompletely correspondent terms.Interpretation is adopted to interpret the background information of the source text.Annotation is adopted to explain essential concepts in the video background slides to complete conveying course information.Sentences that do not conform to the academic language style in the source text are rewritten in a more concise and precise form.The practice has shown that the translation of information texts requires concise and clear language to convey information to target readers faithfully.Therefore,the pre-translation preparation work,including proofreading the source subtitles and background information learning,is necessary.The translation should conform to the style and features of the academic language.The target text should be easy to understand for the course takers.This report summarizes some practical experience in MOOC translation and hopes to be useful for MOOC translators.