A Translation Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Mechanical Product Instructions

With the integration of global economy, an increasing number of companies in China begin to do international trade. For this reason, English product instruction becomes a necessity for those companies. However, the study of Chinese-English product instruction translation falls far behind the study of its English-Chinese counterpart. The current study for the former one is far from enough. Product instructions belong to texts for science and technology and own the majority characteristics that science and technology texts have. On the whole, scientific English search for coherence in logic as well as clarity and fluency in expression. It tries to avoid obscure in expression, show personal feelings and subjective randomness in argument. Therefore, descriptive adjectives and those adverbs, interjections and interrogatives that have a lyrical function are seldom adopted in scientific articles. Scientific articles strive to plainness and preciseness for their structure, which means they seldom adopt rhetorical devices that reinforce the infection and the effect of publicity of language so that the readers will not feel the articles are flashy and feint. The process of translating product instructions is a process in which the product information is transformed from one language and culture to another. Therefore, if a translator does the translation of product instructions in a traditional way and only abides by those traditional translation theories, it is impossible that the target text be an ideal translation work.The translation techniques adopted in this translation project are with the guidance of skopos theory which emphasizes on three rules for translation, namely skopos rule, coherence rule as well as fidelity rule. Guided by skopos theory, the following translation techniques are mainly applied:literal translation, division and synthesisation, transfer of voice, word order adjustment, nominalization as well as amplification and omission.The source text chosen is a mechanical product introduction of the equipment produced by Taiyuan HKX Metallurgy Complete Equipment Co., Ltd. Usually, a mechanical product introduction goes with a piece of equipment. It is used for guiding the customers on how to operate the equipment and of great importance in people’s lives. The source text is not too long which is about ten thousand words. And it is not published since it is used mainly for the customers from non-Chinese speaking countries to have a general idea of the products produced in the company. Usually the translated texts are presented in two ways:the texts are uploaded to the official website of the company or they are sent to the clients by email directly.This translation report is composed of five parts, at the very beginning, there is an introduction of the background and significance of the translation project; and then in the second part, an overview of the current situation in scientific English and English for mechanical product instructions as well as relative theories are demonstrated; the following third part is a task description in which features of the source text and the whole translation process are introduced; the fourth part is the most important section of this translation report, in this part the translator illustrates the difficulties and the corresponding translation techniques; and the last part deals with the enlightenment and lessons learned as well as the problems to be solved, which leads to the conclusion of the whole translation report.