A Report On The E-C Translation Of High-Speed Railway:Post-Editing Of Scientific And Technical Texts Guided By The Theory Of Translation Variation

The theory of translation variation,which was born at the turn of the century,has been developed and perfected in the following years,and has both solid practical foundation and theoretical support.The eight techniques for translation variation,namely “adding,deleting,editing,recomposing,condensing,merging,adapting and imitating”,are considered to be applicable to a wide range of translation,especially the translation of scientific and technical text.Meanwhile,the rapid progress in technology has enabled the wide use of machine translation,and the mode of“machine translation plus post-translation editing”(MTPE)has been commonly applied in the realm of translation.This report is to explore the application of techniques for translation variation in the post-editing of scientific and technical texts.The material selected for translation is High-Speed Railway,an overview on the development of high-speed railroads across the world.As a scientific and technical text,it can be both professional and universal.The translation programme is guided by the theory of translation variation and take the mode of MTPE as its practical approach.It explores how to utilize various translation techniques in concrete cases at the levels of lexicon,syntax and text.In the practice of post-editing,the translator adopted 13 kinds of translation techniques,namely word-adding,word-deleting,word-replacing,sentence-merging,sentence-condensing,sentence-recomposing,sentence-editing,sentence-imitating,text-merging and text-editing,so as to avoid the confusion led by mistranslation or polysemous words,provide more information to the source text or machine translation,and simplify the content and avoid redundancy before making the target text readable to the Chinese readers.In the light of the process and results of translation practice,this report concludes that the proper use of techniques for translation variation in the post-editing of scientific and technical texts can ensure the quality of translation while improving efficiency.Apart from that,with the help of glossary,the unification of technical terms not only ensure the professionalism of the translation,but also make the post-editing more convenient.In addition,the translator’s proficiency in related fields not only guarantees the quality of his translation,but also enables him to find the flaws caused by source text and make corresponding corrections.The translation practice tests and enhances the translator’s abilities in translating,text editing,comprehensive computer using and information retrieving.Via this report,it is also expected that experience can be used by fellow translators for further reference.