Strategies For C-E Translation Of Electromechanical Product Operating Instructions: From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the dramatic development of economic globalization, the export economy hasbeen playing a key role in our national economy. As an essential part of the exporteconomy, however, the mechanical and electrical export industry nowadays is facing atough situation of overseas publicity. According to some reports, the poor Englishversions of the electromechanical product operating instructions (EMPOIs) intended forthe foreign customers are never satisfactorily acceptable, and this discouraging situationhas badly impaired the image of China’s exported electromechanical products.However, very limited research has been done on how to improveChinese-English(C-E) translation of product operation instructions (POIs) theoreticallyand practically. Therefore, this study, on the basis of previous researches on C-Etranslation of POIs, takes the first to employ Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory and Zeng’sstrategic principles of Theme-Oriented Information-Prominence andEconomic-Conciseness for applied translation to explore the appropriate strategies forC-E translation of EMPOIs.To conduct this research, a corpus of sixty EMPOIs has been built in advance and aqualitative study is expounded. Firstly, the thirty English EMPOIs and thirty C-EEMPOIs are separately analyzed for generalizing their distinctive features. Secondly, bycontrasting the original English versions with their translated counterparts, the problemsin C-E translation of EMPOIs will be elaborated and then analyzed for the underlyingcauses. Thirdly, the application of Adaptation Theory in C-E translation of EMPOIs willbe discussed and different strategies for the adaptation of the process of C-E translationof EMPOIs will be suggested.Finally, the efforts of this research can be seen in the findings that can just answerthe proposed research questions of this study. Firstly, the parallel text analysisdemonstrates that although Chinese and English EMPOIs have similarities ininformational content, informational organization, function and stylistics they differentiate from each other both at the lexical level and the syntactical level. Secondly,these problems in C-E translation of EMPOIs including chinglish, lack of standardizationand readability and cross-cultural communication failure are rooted in such underlyingfactors as the limited capability of translators, the absence of effective theoreticalguidance and the gap of cultural background and thinking mode. Thirdly, it is proved thatAdaptation Theory has explanatory power for C-E translation of EMPOIs and the lattercan be interpreted as a unique process of both choice-making and dynamic linguistic andextra-linguistic adaptation, meanwhile such strategies as amplification, omission, literaltranslation, liberal translation and relocation are put forward and proved to be practicalfor C-E translation of EMPOIs.This study is theoretically and practically significant. At the theoretical level, itapplies Adaptation Theory to explore the process of C-E translation of EMPOIs,providing reference for translation study of POIs while enriching and furthering the studyof C-E translation of EMPOIs. At the practical level, this study is hopefully to improvethe C-E translation of EMPOIs, achieving effective acceptance of the overseas customers,which may help facilitate the promotion of China’s exported electromechanical productsabroad.