On The Translation Practice Of Excerpts From Lean Manufacturing

This is a report on the translation of excerpts from Lean Manufacturing. The source text, written by Bill Carreira, who works with his clients as a facilitator, mentor,and trainer of lean manufacturing methodologies, is known as a thirty-year experience book. At present, it has not been officially published in Chinese. But its Chinese Version is expected to appear next year. Based on its textual characteristics, the first part of the book “the What” has been translated under the guidance of functionalist translation theory--Function plus Loyalty, aiming at reproducing the style of source text and achieving the textual function and translation purpose.The report consists of four parts: introduction to the project, description of the translation process, translation difficulties and approaches, and the conclusion.Chapter One briefly introduces the background, material, purposes and significance of the translation practice. Chapter Two shows the translation plan, and the analysis of the source text around its textual, lexical and sentence characteristics. The applicability of “Function plus Loyalty” to the scientific and technical text also be explained in this chapter as well as the content of the theory. Chapter Three is case study of translation difficulties, including four kinds of difficulties encountered, such as the integration of formal and informal style; grammar difficulties in terms,complicated clauses, phrases, present tense and passive voice; limitation from the practical environment and the deficiency of translation ability. Corresponding strategies like literal translation, foreignization and communicative translation are applied to solve the style problem, skills like additional or splitting translation to grammar problems, and passive-to-active method to voice problem. Chapter Four summarizes some experience and thoughts from the translation practice. Specially,enriched knowledge about scientific and technical text is needed to complete translation rigorously. At last, it is clear that there is a long to go for better translation.