A Report On The Translation Of Eyelink Data Viewer User’s Manual

Along with the rapid development of science and technology, the eye tracker has become a widely used instrument in psychology and education studies. Most Eye Trackers used in China, however, are introduced from western countries. Since not all users in China do well in English, therefore, it is necessary to translate the users’ manuals from English into Chinese. With the expansion of translation studies in general,the study of product manual translation has been prosperous in recent decades, bringing about a variety of relevant reports, papers and works. Unfortunately, few of them have analyzed the translation of product manuals in a systemic way. Consequently, few studies may shed light on future product manual translation practice.In view of the above practical and academic settings, this report provides a systemic description and analysis of the reporter’s personal practice of translating the user’s manual of an Eye Tracker, i.e., EyeLink Data Viewer, from English into Chinese through the integrated methodology of theory-based case analysis on the basis of Systemic Procedure and Skopostheorie. First of all, the report provides a description and scrutiny of the procedure of the translation practice in the light of Jia Zhengchuan’s Systemic Procedure of Translation to see whether it is optimized or not. The result of the examination indicates that the translation procedure is generally suitable and optimized, as the reporter has roughly followed the four steps of general manipulation,environmental connection, systemic operation, and process execution in each of the stages of pre-translation work, source text comprehension, target text expression and post-translation follow-ups. Some steps in certain stages, however, are not exactly performed, such as the environmental connection in the target text expression.Consequently, some parts of the translation are not appropriate in the context. Secondly,the report offers a depiction and examination of the application of translation techniques from the perspective of Skopostheorie. The reporter applied different translation methods such as documentary and instrumental translation and various translationtechniques such as conversion, diction, division, so as to achieve the Skopos rule, the coherence rule as well as the fidelity rule,. The result of the analysis reveals that most of the translated text has observed the three rules, except for some terms.This report is hopefully meaningful to the practice and theory of science and technology translation as well as product manual’s translation in that the reported procedure and methods of translation may be applied in translation practice and may stimulate thinking in translation studies.