| Military translation studies have immense strategic significance, but military translation has not been widely studied because of its characteristics of confidentiality and its special domain etc. In order to study military text, the translator translated an American military document--Department of Defense Strategic Plan for Language Skills, Regional Expertise, and Cultural Capabilities: 2011-2016(The Plan) and two appendices of it. The Plan describes the foreign language capabilities of American army and the civilians from the dimensions of language skills, regional expertise, and cultural capabilities. The Plan defines foreign language capabilities at the strategic level, guides the direction of America’s Defense language at a macro level and offers reliable reference to make America’s language strategy and integrate America’s language capabilities resources. Through translating this text, the translator tries to understand the language characteristics of English military text and shares some opinions about translation strategies of such military text from the angle of English-to-Chinese translation.There are two steps to finish this report. The first step is to translate the source text with the help of SDL Trados 2014. The second step is to review problems in translation process, and their solutions. The features of the source text are as follows:Firstly, there are many abbreviations in the source text and each has its own special meaning; Secondly, some common words, when used in the military text, have special military meanings; Thirdly, the whole source text is full of long sentences, passive sentences, abstract nouns and some nouns are modified by many adjectives. In order to translate better, the translator dealt with the source text in the following ways: when translating abbreviations, the translator adopted the methods of literal translation and free translation; when translating the common words with special military meanings,the translator followed the theory of context and decided the most appropriate meaning of these words by analyzing the sentence, the paragraph, and the whole text where the word was used; when translating long sentences, the translator firstanalyzed the structure of the sentence, and then used the strategy of linear translation,inverse translation, divide translation and comprehensive translation to integrate and reorganize the sentence; when translating passive sentence, the translator usually translated it into active sentence; when there were many adjectives modifying one noun, the translator left out some adjectives if these adjectives were of the same meaning and adjusted these adjectives to short sentences when needed.Through this project, the translator hopes to reach the following goals: in the first place, to learn more about military text features so that the translator can improve her translation skills; in the second place, to introduce some foreign military documents so that the translator can make a little contribution to improving foreign language capability of China’s army. With the accelerated pace of internationalization, Chinese army is participating in more and more international military actions and non-military actions. The importance of foreign language capability has become increasingly prominent. The building of language skills,regional expertise and cultural capacity in America’s army is of great significance in guiding related work in China’s army. But at present China has no professional evaluation system to exam the army’s foreign language capability or unified standards of foreign language proficiency. China does not pay enough attention to the strategic position of foreign language capability. The translator hopes America’s experience on building the capability of defense language will offer some guidance to Chinese army. |
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