Report On English-chinese Translation Of October 2013 World Economic Outlook(Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the development of globalization, international finance has become a focus in the world. Governors, finance practitioners and others need to timely get information about global finance. World Economic Outlook(WEO) is one of the publications released by the International Monetary Fund(IMF). I downloaded the October 2013 WEO from the official website of the IMF, and then excerpted the first20 pages of the first chapter as the source text for my graduation translation project and as the study subject for the report.The source text(ST) focuses on global prospects and policies with texts and detailed diagrams. Before translation, I made a linguistic and style analysis of the ST.After that, I did a trial translation on the sample text(about 1,000 words), and found that the skopos theory might be an appropriate theoretical basis for the translation practice. The report is a summary of real translation practice from the perspective of the skopos theory.This report consists of the following chapters: Chapter one mainly presents the project background, significance and text description as well as the report structure.Chapter two is designed to review current studies on English-Chinese translation of financial texts and to introduce the skopos theory. Chapter three describes major translation procedures(pre-translation, in-translation and post-translation).Pre-translation refers to the preparatory work. In-translation introduces the basic translation procedures with the application of the trial SDL Trados Studio 2011(referred to hereafter as “Trados”). Post-translation refers to the quality assurance(QA)by using Trados and by manual proofreading. Chapter four, the core of this report, isthe detailed description of the technical difficulties and their solutions as well as language difficulties and the case analysis. The technical difficulties include how to efficiently translate this PDF text, how to solve the problem of the slow operation of Trados and mismatches between texts and graphs in most charts of the target text exported from Trados, etc. I encountered language difficulties on the lexical and syntactic levels as well as that of rhetorical devices during the translation. On the lexical level, the language difficulties concerning financial terms, “common words”and compound words are respectively discussed. On the syntactic level, the sentences with dashes, sentences with non-finite verbs and the passive voice sentences are analyzed. Regarding rhetorical devices, the translation methods of retaining rhetorical devices and discarding rhetorical devices are focused on. The detailed analysis of language difficulties proves that, with the guidance of the skopos theory, different translation methods such as literal translation, back translation, restructuring sentence structures, retaining rhetorical devices, discarding rhetorical devices, etc. can be adopted to solve language difficulties and achieve the purpose of the translation.Chapter five is the conclusion, which shares real experience and points out possibilities for further study.The report proves that the skopos theory is an appropriate theoretical basis for the translation of financial texts. In the current Chinese language service market,translators need have solid bilingual competence and grasp computer-aided translation skills.