A Report On The Translation Of "Sustainable Aviation—A Management Perspective"(Chapter 2)

The source text of this translation project,“Technology Assessment for Sustainable Aviation”,co-authored by Alexander Stauch and Adrian Müller,is Chapter 2 of the book titled Sustainable Aviation — A Management Perspective,introducing and evaluating the current and future technologies for sustainable aviation.The source text is an informative technological text,the main features of which are the extensive use of technical terms and impersonal subject sentences,and the intricate nature of the syntactic and discourse structure.The priority of the translation project is to produce a naturally written version that is faithful to the information of the source text.The author of this translation report seeks the guidance of Nida’s functional equivalence theory which was proposed in 1986.Advocating achieving the closest natural equivalence in translation,this receptor-oriented translation theory considers it to be essential that the target text should be tailored to the receptor’s linguistic needs to ensure natural expression.Guided by the theory,the author of this translation report is capable of making the translated version more acceptable and accessible to the target readers.During the translation process,the author of this translation report has encountered some difficulties.Corresponding solutions are applied under the guidance of the functional equivalence theory.At the lexical level,during the translation of terminologies without corresponding established expressions in the target language,the methods of literal translation and semantic translation are both adopted to ensure accurate transfer of meaning.At the syntactic level,the main difficulties lie in the translation of impersonal subject clauses or sentences and complex sentences.The methods of conversion and inversion are adopted to conform to the target-language pattern of expression so that the naturalness could be achieved in the target text.At the discourse level,to ensure the cohesion and coherence between sentences,the author of this translation report often makes explicit the connection between sentences by adding or specifying the corresponding conjunctions,especially when the cohesive relation between sentences is implicit in the source text.