A Report On English-Chinese Translations Of Equipment Operation Manual

This report presents a brief overview of a translation practice project conducted in the first year of my MTI program in Yangzhou University. In addition, some theoretical reflections and a tentative conclusion based upon Skopostheorie is offered. The translation task of the project, entrusted by a translation service provider, involves English-Chinese translation of the operation manual (about 16000 words in total) of a mechanical product imported from Germany.As an important affiliation with any mechanical product, operation manuals play crucial roles in offering guidance and directions to consumers and users for the guarantee of proper installation, adjustment, operation, troubleshooting and maintenance. In addition, they typically offer professional and detailed description of the working principle, structure, and composing parts of the equipment. As such, they mainly serve descriptive and directive functions,Taking Skopostheorie as a theoretical framework, and based upon analysis of stylistic features of English equipment operation manuals from the perspectives of lexicons, syntax and discourse management, this report discusses some reflections on the translation process. Drawing upon numerous examples chosen from the source text together with my Chinese translation, it tries to explore the feasibility of applying Skopostheorie to English-Chinese translation of equipment operation manuals and puts forward some basic requirements for translation practice of this type of literature, which are accuracy, professionalism, simplicity and smoothness.Besides, translation strategies like conversion, omission, repetition, division and restructuring can be flexibly adopted in the translation of equipment operation manuals to adapt to the context and linguistic structure of the target language.This report draws the tentative conclusion that the fundamental principles of Skopostheorie may be assumed both as guiding principles as well as practical approaches to the translation of equipment operation manuals and are conducive to adequate translation.