A Report On The Translation Of Business Without Borders:A Strategic Guide To Global Marketing (Excerpts)

The birth and evolution of the Internet help companies outstrip existing markets and open a wider range of market with the advanced technologies on the Web. For Chinese companies to grow and develop, it is of great importance to introduce and learn the new marketing ideas and strategies of other countries.This paper is a report on the translation of the first chapter “Discovering the Eighth Continent” excerpted from the book Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing, which discusses marketing strategies such as globalization, localization and internationalization. Technological and practical, the original English text involves a great many professional fields, such as marketing,business, finance and IT. In order to help the target readers to better understand the information in the original text, the translator, guided by Nida's functional equivalence theory, first analyzed the structure and language features of the source text, and then adopted different translation methods in order to accurately and naturally convey the source text information.The paper is divided into four chapters. Chapter One introduces the source and significance of the translation task, with a focus on the structure and language features of the original text. Chapter Two describes the translation practice, including the preparation work, the translation process and quality control, and the revision and finalization of the translated version. Chapter Three analyzes the specific cases guided by the functional equivalence translation theory from three aspects: vocabularies,sentences and rhetorical devices. On the lexical level, the translator adopted the techniques of literal translation, free translation, extending word meanings and changing word class respectively for proper nouns, newly-created words, and everyday words. On the sentence level, sentences with functional verbs were divided into several clauses; attributives in sentences were repositioned; negative sentences were conversed into affirmative ones and vice versa. As for sentences with rhetorical devices, the translator keeps or abandons the original images, or substituted the original meaning with Chinese images or expressions. Chapter Four is the conclusion of the whole task; it summarizes the fruitful gains achieved by the translator on one hand, and points out the deficiencies in the translation process on the other hand.