On The Faithfulness,Expressiveness,and Elegance Of Military English Translation

With a focus on the translation of the pamphlet The United States Army Field Manual 20-3 Camouflage,Concealment,and Decoys,this thesis aims to explore the benefits of faithfulness,expressiveness,and elegance on military English translation.Based on Reiss's text type theory,this manual is labeled as the informative text and applied military text.The first translation criterion of such text should be faithful,followed by expressive and elegant.If faithfulness,expressiveness,and elegance are contradictory to each other,translators should choose faithfulness over expressiveness and elegance.If expressiveness and elegance are contradictory to each other,translators should choose expressiveness over elegance.In practices,faithfulness is the foremost criterion in translating words,while expressiveness and elegance are respectively used to guide the syntactic and stylistic language features.Lexically,the wording of this manual is in a strict and serious tone,with more formal and written language and few spoken or military slangs.The translator believes that only when faithfulness was applied to the translation of the smallest unit-words,the target text is faithful to the original one.The translation of these words is illustrated from three categories:terms,ordinary words with military meanings,and abbreviations.Syntactically,the manual is straightforward in expression,rigorous in logic,and objective in information.Passive voice and nominalization are widely adopted in sentences.During the translation,translators need to take into account the differences between English and Chinese,and to get rid of the shackles of the original sentence structure if necessary,so that the target text is standard,naturally and idiomatically in line with China's military language wording.In doing so,translators should flexibly deploy techniques between literal and free translation,addition and reduction,linear translation and sentence reconstruction.Stylistically,the manual is clear in conceptual structures,not only featured in scientific,conceptual and logical narrations as found in other technical texts,but also with a unique military flavor.During the translation,translators should use similar rigorous and logical sentence structures to revive the explicitness,relationalization and compactness of its semantic structures and styles.