A Report On The Translation Of Striving For Better Jobs: The Challenge Of Informality In The Middle East And North Africa (Chapter 3)

This paper is a report on the translation of the third chapter(“Informality and Firms”) of Striving for Better Jobs: the Challenge of Informality in the Middle East and North Africa, which analyzes the informality from the perspective of firms. The original text discusses the main characteristics and causes of informality among firms in the Middle East and North Africa based on the firm-level data, including data on the formal and informal micro, small, medium and large firms, which is conducive to the understanding of informal employment. The translator, in accordance with Katharina Reiss’ s classification of text type and Hans Vermeer’s skopos theory, has managed to translate the referential information in the original informative text in “plain propose” and in idiomatic manner with the purposes of letting the ordinary people have an in-depth understanding of informality among firms and workers and if possible, serving as referential materials for the related experts to come out with some solutions for the unemployment. This translation report has five chapters and mainly tells the background and significance of the project, main contents and features of the source text, two translation theories, difficulties in translating and the corresponding solutions and lessons learned from the translation project and problems to be solved.