Translating Foreign Trade Text

Along with the rapid development of the field of nonliterary translation as a whole,the translation of foreign trade texts is flourishing in China. It seems, however, that thepractice of foreign trade translation is not immune from difficulties or troubles. With theexpansion of nonliterary translation studies in general, the study of foreign tradetranslation has been thriving in the recent decades, bringing about a variety of relevantpapers and works. Until now, however, work done in the study of foreign tradetranslation is still weakened by partiality instead of generality or pursuit for noveltyrather than practicality in theoretical basis and methodology, e.g., more reliance onpostmodern theories than general and classical approaches. Targeted to the practicalproblem of inadequate practice of foreign trade translation and the academic problem ofpreference for partial or peculiar theories, the present report will therefore provide adepiction and examination of the author’s personal practice of translating a foreign tradetext through the integrated methodology of theory-based case analysis on the basis ofJia Zhengchuan’s Procedure of Systemic Translation and Eugine A. Nida’s Principle ofFunctional Equivalence so as to discover its strengths and weaknesses in its translationprocedure and principle.Firstly, this report offers an account and scrutiny of the procedures of the author’sforeign trade translation practice on the basis of Jia’s Systemic Procedure of Translationto find out whether the procedure is well organized and suitable. Results of theinspection demonstrate that the procedure of the author’s translation of the foreign tradetext is generally systematic and proper as the author performs adequately in most of thefour steps of overall manipulation, environmental relation, system operation, andprocess execution within most of the four stages of pre-translation work, source textanalysis, target text production, and post-translation work. In certain steps of somephases, e.g., the step of overall manipulation in the stages of pre-and post-translationhowever, the author does not strictly proceed along the normal route, thus failing to achieve the optimal result. Secondly, this report provides a description and investigationof the author’s translation principle in reference to Nida’s Functional EquivalencePrinciple to see whether or how much the function of the author’s translation is similarto that of the source text. Outcomes of the comparison of the source and target textsreveal that the effect of most parts of the author’s translation on the target readers in thetarget cultural context is roughly equal to that of the corresponding parts of the sourcetext on the source text readers in the source language context. There are, however,places in the author’s translation which are not similar to their counterparts in theoriginal text in terms of their potential effect on the reader.This report is hopefully meaningful both to foreign trade translation practice and tononliterary translation research. Practically, its findings will demonstrate that successfulforeign trade translation is secured when the translator follows a well-organizedprocedure of translation and abides by a principle emphasizing functional equivalencethrough the application of appropriate techniques or strategies. Academically, itstheoretical basis and methodology may help to compensate for the weaknesses in thebasis and methods of previous studies of foreign trade translation in particular and ofnonliterary translation in general.