A Report On The C-E Translation Of Technical Specifications For Electronic Equipment From The Perspective Of Theory Of Adaptation

With the current trend of economic globalization, many Chinese enterprises spare no effort to obtain their optimal trade partners globally. Such ambition makes it necessary for enterprises to provide an English version of technical specifications (TS) in tendering documents. Therefore, English technical specifications, covering such contents as general and technical agreement and featuring English for science and technology and legal English, serve as an important bridge of communication and meanwhile an important framework of standards in the whole bidding process. At present, however, not many satisfactory technical specifications are available for specification drafters to refer to.Theory of Adaptation formulated by Verschueren (1999) summarizes three properties of language and further proposes four angles of investigation. It emphasizes dynamic interrelationship of contextual correlates of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability and the salience of adaptation processes. It enables translators to consider cognitive, social, cultural and linguistic factors that influence communicative contexts and continuously make choices about structures at various levels of language. Therefore, this theory offers a new perspective of translation studies.This report, guided by Theory of Adaptation, aims at presenting difficulties at lexical and syntactical levels encountered in the Chinese-English translation process of technical specifications. More specifically, it intends to explore translation techniques that are adoptable to address difficulties in representing the style of technical specifications in bidding invitation documents. This report first briefly describes the background, process and importance of the translation project. Then it analyses features of technical specifications in tendering documents from the perspective of contents and writing styles, followed by a summary of translation difficulties in this concern, such as the translation of terminologies, model verbs, null-subject sentences and long sentences. This report finally discusses specific techniques used in the context of technical specifications by referring to Theory of Adaptation. This report points out that to better evaluate the whole translation process, three extra-linguistic factors, among which are parallel corpora, interaction between translators and clients and translators’self-assessment, are relevant to translation performance.