Translation Quality And Acceptability Of C-E Technical Translation

In current translation market, the translation speed and efficiency are becoming more important translation briefs, but in China, there are still few accurate standards to evaluate the quality and to access the acceptability of practical translation. A lot of scholars regard the concept of translation acceptability somehow equal to that of translation acceptability; few differences or correlations between them have been distinguished. Particularly, the translation quality and acceptability of technical translation, which is of more importance and wider applications, might greatly influence the implementation of cross-national projects or the use of manufacturing machines. Based on this, this paper seeks to analyze the correlations between the translation quality and translation acceptability as well as factors that influence the translation acceptability of the Chinese-English technical translation by combining the translation experience in the project of Pressure Vessel Manufacturing Procedure File with survey results, so as to put forward reasonable recommendations for technical translation.Questionnaires are used for this research; subjects of this research include the potential users of the translated documents, translation scholars or experts, student translators and other ordinary readers. Questionnaires in this research are divided into two parts:the first part is text analysis and translation quality assessment and the second one is questions that are related to translation acceptability. All questionnaires are sent out and recycled through online links, and data collected are analyzed using the SPSS19.0.First of all, the general descriptive statistics of the survey results are described, which include the description of the basic information, knowledge backgrounds, readers’focuses and translation quality assessment. Then data are analyzed quantitatively using the methods of correlation analysis, regression analysis and analysis of variances. Results show that1) translation quality is positively correlated with the translation acceptability, but it is not decisive to the translation acceptability, translation acceptability is also influenced by some peritextual factors like the technical English competence;2) reader’s knowledge background or the occupation does not influence the translation acceptability significantly,3) the correlations between the translation acceptability and reader’s expectation of translator qualification are positive. In addition, judging from the feedbacks of the readers, the general acceptability might be influenced by improper terminology, obscure modal inference, misunderstood logical relationship and the differences between Chinese and English. At last recommendations are given to technical translation.