Report On The Translation Of A Request For Proposals By The Ministry Of Electricity Of Iraq

The source material for translator's MTI translation project is a request for proposals issued by the Ministry of Electricity of the Government of Iraq.The RFP in question specifies technical,quality and time limit requirements for the operation and maintenance of an open cycle power plant and for its conversion to a combined cycle power plant.This kind of text is of high logicality and consistency.Also,language in it is expected to be more or less refined,formal and concise.Therefore,translation should reflect all these features.The whole project was conducted in three stages,including the preparation stage,the translation stage and the quality control stage.During the preparation stage,the RFP was read through;glossary in it was listed;related specialized knowledge was acquired and technical terms were consulted.Parallel texts include related articles in power industry and some RFPs in different industries.Meanwhile,reference books and dictionaries were prepared,such as English-English dictionaries,English-Chinese dictionaries,etc.In the process of translation,it proved necessary to fully understand and know the language of this request for proposals and the whole text was analyzed in terms of vocabulary,syntactic structure and grammar.The next move was to actually translate the original text into Chinese.In light of the language features of RFPs,the language in the target version was expected to be as refined and concise as it was the case in the original.Of course,a second attempt to understand the original would prove necessary in case a first comprehension attempt should fail and give rise to mistranslation.Besides,when encountering difficult terms or fixed expressions,the translator would consult relevant experts to make the translation more professional sounding and more accurate.In the quality control stage,a student of the same major was asked to find out whether grammatical or vocabulary problems still existed in the translated text.Later,the translated text was sent to a power sector professional who does not know English to see whether this text would meet the reading habit of the people who work in power industry.Through the translation project,the translator has gained some relevant experience in translating commercial documents in general and in rendering requests for proposals in particular.It is hoped that this experience will provide certain reference for future translators of requests for proposals in power industry and offer them with alternatives to solving terminological problems in related fields.