Translation Of Product Manuals

Product instructions are playing a more and more important part in people's life. They provide information about a certain product and instruct users to operate or maintain the product. Besides, a good instruction can attract consumers to buy the product, thus establishing a good image for the producers and increasing their profits. Product instructions have their unique features, such as frequent use of nouns and nominations, technical terms, abbreviations, imperative sentences and passive sentences. In addition, accuracy and brevity are a most important feature of instructions. In view of the funtions and features of instructions, translation of English product instructions should take into consideration the linguistic differences between these two languages and adjust the sentence structures to ensure fluency and readability of the translation. Factual mistakes should also be avoided.The first chapter of this thesis is about the functions and features of product instructions, and present problems regarding their translation. The second chapter is the core of this essay. It first describes the case and its tranlating process. Then it selects examples from the case to analyse the problems and gives solutions by refering to parallel texts and other materials. Based on the first two chapters'analysis, the third chapter summarizes approaches to translate English product instructions.