Translating Product Manual Based On The Theory Of Reiss’s Text Typology

As one type of the technical English, product manual intends to popularize newtechnologies and products. In the context of economic globalization, more and moreforeign products have come into Chinese market. Due to the increasingly important rolein daily life and communication, quality translation of foreign product manual is in hugedemand. However, the study of product manual translation is a weak point in China atpresent and the quality of product manual translation is not satisfactory.Product manual is featured for its four properties: simplicity, objectivity, logicalityand of high pertinence. The source text mainly introduces the operative measures ofMemoQ with software’s screen-shots. The language of the source text is plain andpersuasive, thus text typology theory is suitable to the whole translation progress.Regarding of this, this report, at the guidance of text typology, based on the translator’sown translation practice, generalizes some translation strategies by analyzing theprocess of translating MemoQ Quick Start Guide (for translator).After the analysis of the translated text, the following findings can be concluded:At lexical level, this report adopts plain prose strategy as the key strategy and theadaptive strategy as the assistant one. As for the former, translators can adoptamplification, omission and extended translation for that there are a number of termsand professional words in academic works. By doing this, the translator is trying tosatisfy the users’ needs. As for the latter, the translator mainly introduces the addition ofperson tone to elicit the users’ responses and narrow the gap between the product andthe user. At syntactical level, this report mainly uses plain prose strategy. This reportadopts reversion, changing sentences from passive voice to active voice, dividing andrecombining sentences. The translator makes these adjustments to make sure theChinese users can grasp the inner logic meaning of the text.This report, at the guidance of text typology, based on the translator’s own translation practice, generalizes some translation strategies by analyzing the translationprocess of translating MemoQ Quick Start Guide (for translator) from plain prosestrategy and the adaptive strategy. It can serve as a reference for the translation practicesin this field and make a complement to the research of technical translation undertheoretical guidance.