Study On Roles Of Translators In Business Translation

With rapid development of China's economy, more international trades and business activities take place, and thus bigger market is created for business translation. However some translators can not produce satisfactory translation, which has negative influence on business activities. Bilingual ability and translation strategies are certainly main factors to the quality of translation works. However, orientation for translators are important as well, which will affect the adoption of translation strategies in some extent.Previous studies tend to position translators on some passive roles such as"servant","dancer in chains","translation machine","tongue person"(literal translation), or"shadow", and all these were under the main theme of"faithfulness". However, business text bears its own characteristics like integrity, conciseness, concreteness, correctness, clarity, politeness and consideration and unlike those literature classics or authoritative works, no adaptation should be made except the author himself, thus the roles like"servant"can not suit for business translators.In this article, the author tried to discuss about the roles business translators should play in business translation based on case study of three pieces of business translation and previous study on translators'roles. The translators are supposed to play different roles under different circumstances: in some cases, original texts are not well-written articles and the clients allow the translators to adapt the original text, then the translators should be the modifiers of the original text; in some cases, original texts are not well-written but the clients just request the translator to translate what they have and keep the original text as it is, then the translators should be composers especially for inappropriate parts; last but not the least, despite the characteristics business text have, many materials clients provide are important documents and have gone through internal validations already and are free from mistakes neither in language level or content level, the only thing translators need to do is to be a good communicator, ensuring correct understanding of the text and making bilingual adaptation to fulfill better communications between the original text and target audiences.