A Report On The Translation Of "The Future Of NATO’s Air And Missile Defence" Under The Coherence Rule

The source text of this translation report,“The Future of NATO’s Air and Missile Defence”was published by RUSI in July 2021.Grounded in the context of great power competition,this article describes NATO’s defense deficiencies in air and missile defense and proposes a series of solutions and mitigation measures,while highlighting the threat challenges facing NATO.When the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out in 2022,as a European country,Ukraine’s national defense and security naturally became one of the key concerns of NATO.There are three main reasons for choosing to translate this article: first,it follows current affairs and tracks the development direction of NATO’s air and missile defense;second,it increases our military’s understanding of NATO air and missile defense;third,it provides study reference for modernization of national defense.The source text belongs to the military text,which contains a large number of proper nouns,professional terms,abbreviations,complex sentences,etc.,and involves the background knowledge of the defense facilities,war decision-making and strategic background of NATO countries.The translator took the coherence rule proposed by the German translation theorist Hans J·Vermeer as her theoretical framework.Under the guidance of this theory,the translator first analyzed the lexical,syntactic and textual characteristics of the source text.Then,in order to conform to the reading habits and meet the expectations of the target language readers,and make them understand and accept the target text,the translator focused on three translation strategies under the guidance of the coherence rule: clarifying meanings,explicating logical relationships and satisfying reading expectations of the target language readers,and finally achieved intralinguistic coherence.In this translation practice,the above three strategies could not only solve the problems of difficult vocabulary,complex sentences and obscure logical relations in the source text,but also helped the target language readers better understand and accept the content of the source text,and provide useful reference for the future translation of military texts.