The Translation Practice Report On XX Automotive Maintenance Manual

The people’s demand for vehicle products is increasing gradually in modern life.Many automobile companies begin to research and develop the new type of vehicle products for promoting an “environment-friendly society”.The quantity of exporting products of domestic brands increased sharply,so the translation demand for product and maintenance manual is very great.This paper takes the part of body control module in XX Automotive Maintenance Manual as the materials of translation practice.This maintenance manual is divided into 11 chapters,which introduces the fault judgement and maintenance operations of BCM(body control module)in detail.Due to the poor readability of this manual,and its target readers are dealers,professional personnel and customers who come from the nonEnglish-speaking countries.Therefore,the complete,fluent and readers-oriented translation is very important.Under the guidance of Newmark’s communication theory,this paper will analyze these problems in communication translation and semantic translation.Semantic translation emphasizes that the translation must be faithful to the source text and represents the original context with the permission of grammar structure.The communication translation believes that the translation should be close to the target readers on the base of accuracy and fluency.This paper believes that there are three sentence phenomena causing the readers hard to understand: Firstly,the source text lacks of component absence such as lacking of subject,predicate and object.Since Chinese is “parataxis-oriented” language with loose form,and its sentence meaning is always connected by short sentence.However,English is the“hypotaxis-oriented” language with rigorous structure,thus the absence of components cause lack the sentence meaning and the ambiguity of sentence which makes hard to understanding,and influence the maintenance operation.The translator should ensure the referent of the absent component in original sentence according to the context analysis and adopt communication translation strategy to solve reasonably,making the translation conform to the language habit of target readers.Secondly,the component redundance in source text is divided into predicate and object redundance.It will cause the semantic repetition so that aggravates the understanding burden for target readers.Therefore,the translator should adopt the communication translation strategy to delete the redundant parts appropriately and make the translation more concise,fluent and easy to understand.Thirdly,the disordered ambiguous logic in sentence is divided into semantic disorder and communicative disorder.Since,the automobile maintenance manual is full of professional terminology;the translator should analyze the semantic content and logical order to ensure the original meaning,considering the thinking logic,expression method and the way of acceptance in target language.It will improve the accuracy and fluency of translation by using reasonably semantic translation and communicative translation strategies.The readeroriented translation can help readers learn the product structures,fault reasons and maintenance operations better and faster,it also can provide a better post-sale experience for customers.The translation theory of Newmark plays a significant role to guide the study of automobile translation with strong application.This paper enriches the applicable range of Newmark’s communicative translation to some extent and provides the reference for translation study of science and technology text.Limited of time and translator’s ability,the reaction and acceptance of target readers for the maintenance manual translation need to be further studied.