A Report On The E-C Translation Of Tender Documents Of Trackwork

With the unstoppable trend of globalization and the deepening of China's reform and opening up,international tendering is playing an increasingly important role in the international trading activities,including the trading of bulk goods,biding and contracting of construction projects,and the procurement and supply of projects,etc.In accordance with the international conventions,all the international tender documents shall be compiled in English.In rare cases,if they are written in other languages,there should be an English version attached,to which can be resorted in case of any divergence.Therefore,the accurate translation of the international tender documents is regarded as the cornerstone of the success of the tendering activities.A lot of research have been carried out by many scholars in order to accurately translate the tender documents.Based on the practical translation of a set of English tender documents published by the Land Transport Authority in Singapore for the bidding of the construction of several downtown lines,with the help of the previous research results,the author has given a systematical analysis of English tender documents from aspects of lexicon,syntax and text,and accordingly explained the translation principles applied.Lexically,technical terms and abbreviations,synonyms in pairs and formal wording are frequently used in English tender documents.In the translation process,the translator should make full of the context and spare no efforts to ensure the similarity between original texts and target texts.Syntactically,four kinds of sentences are tended to be applied: long and complex sentences,periodic sentences with nominalization words and structures as subjects,sentences with passive voices,and the ones with “shall” as modal verb.Therefore,the differences between the Chinese and English languages,and the common way of structuringsentences in Chinese tender documents should be taken into consideration in the translation.Textually,(a)English tender documents adopt formal style of writing,(b)bolding and italics and other kinds of markings are used to express specific meaning,and(c)English tender documents,as a kind of informative text,its frequency and readability should be ensured in order to give target text readers the same experience with those of original texts.With detailed reading and analysis of a number of papers in the field of translation of tender documents,grounded on the language features of English tender documents,the author has reasonably combined Eugene Nida's Back Transformation Theory and the Interpretive Theory of Translation,and put forward a new translation scheme applicable to the E-C translation of tender documents,which includes four translation steps:(a)analysis and comprehension;(b)back transformation and deverbalization;(c)re-expression;(d)test.In this paper,the development of the translation scheme has been detailedly explained,and the application process of the four translation steps has been illustrated with examples.In addition,five commonly used translation strategies,which are repetition,amplification,conversion,inversion and division,have been introduced by exemplifying their application in the E-C translation of tender documents.Founded on the translation practice,a new translation scheme has been put forward,detailedly illustrated and reasonably analyzed.Hopefully,some inspiration can be obtained from reading this paper,and the translation scheme can be applied to make a little contribution to the improvement of the translation of tender documents.