A Report On Translation Of Mechanical Texts From The Prospective Of Semantic Translation

With the deepened globalization and the reform and opening up of China, China isbecoming a major manufacturer. As a result, the standardization of machineryindustry plays an important part in mass manufacturing in machinery industry andpromoting the competitive edge of cranes in international market. Thus, it is necessaryto translate the Chinese version of the design rules for cranes into English so as toenhance the exchange with the outside world and meet the demand of theinternationalization of China.The design rules are normalizative texts and share the common features of textsfor science and technology. Based on the translation practice of Design Rules forCranes of the National Standard of The People’s Republic of China, this reportanalyzes the lexical, syntactic and discourse aspects of the mechanical text. Especially,on lexical level, semantic translation is put forward to deal with mechanicalterminologies，abbreviations and compounds. Besides, a series of effective translationstrategies are employed on syntactic level, including the reference to parallel texts formodeling translation of commonly used sentence patterns and fixed phrases drawnfrom the mechanical specification to deal with long sentences; syntactic restructuringby means of inversion, explicitness change, conversion, division and combination tocope with complex sentences.This report aims at summarizing the translation project of mechanical texts anddiscussing effective translation strategies in mechanical translation in the light ofPeter Newmark’s semantic translation theory and the author’s personal translationexperience. Through the translation practice the author tries to improve the translationefficiency and further enlighten other translators.